Watering Can

Reviews / Votes

Watering the words - Keith Richmond

Watering Can by Caroline Bird (Carcanet, GBP9.95)

Caroline Bird arrives, as William Wordsworth had it in Intimations of Immortality, trailing clouds of glory. She was born in 1986, brought up in Leeds, went to school in York and is now reading English at St Catherine's College, Oxford. She was a winner of the Foyles Young Poet of the Year Award in 1999, when she was 13, and the Peterloo Poets Competition for Young Poets three years later, when she also picked up an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, was published in 2002 and her second, Trouble Came to the Turnip, appeared in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Plays she has written have had rehearsed readings at the Royal Court, student productions in Oxford and performances on the Edinburgh Fringe.

Like the poems in Trouble Came to the Turnip, which was favourably reviewed on these pages, there is an extraordinary energy about the pieces in this collection which were written, she says, over three years, 'time divided between studying English and building my life as a poet.' Her studies have inspired a few of the poems in this collection: Perspectives is a version, albeit a very loose one about young drug addicts, of the Old English lament Deor and Bright Winter Mornings in Oxford Town, her first sonnet, 'also happens to be one of my rudest poems to date': 'Remember when I drank that rum and black / with dirty lips so dumb and kissable? / Now I'm another gown upon the rack. / My sheets are bleached by the invisible. / After I bathe, I neatly shave my crack. / I dress. I take my library books back.'

On display here are Bird's characteristic and surrealistic flights of fancy - '[I] started seeing things: saints with erections / playing netball with elephants'; 'and swans / - as I said - were exploding by the river' - lots of fresh, sharp images - 'the chip boy wore a gutted face / sanctified in grease'; 'Narcissus, a grown man, / with stretchmarks on his heart' - and, in poems like Head Girl, a wry sense of humour.

Watering Can, she says, shows 'what I believe in, as well as what I'm fighting against. Essentially, it's a collection about trying to be happy. So, in a way, it's the saddest book I've ever written. It's about watching my friends, and myself, turn into adults, about the gap between who you are and who you want to be.' It's a more grown up, sophisticated and polished collection: 'Tomorrow / giant watering cans will drip from cranes / into our respective gardens where our respective / partners will be dancing, wet with innocence.' Those already familiar with Caroline Bird's work will be delighted by the scale and range of her new collection. Watering Can is as inventive and poignantly funny as Trouble Came to the Turnip, but feels somehow intensified, the themes richer and sadder: q move from the bar at night to its cafe in the evening.

..........Sometimes

I feel like one tiny lightbulb in a huge flashing poster

advertising peanuts

'Detox'

It's no minor stroke to draw creation out of weariness- and the cast of Watering Can is decidedly heavy-laden. Even the bit-players are 'on the 5,000th day of their temporary job'. bird's incifental asides are always just as well crafted as the overall conceits, poem by poem, which is how it should be: the kids listening to the sound of gunfire on their ipods, Mr Bird's tattoo which 'has its own weight-lifting program.'Presently it strikes me that I would have to make whole sequences out of the number of ideas in just one of Bid's stanzas and I hiss with jealousy.

She works extremely well with conceits, refrains and inverted cliche. In one of my favourites, 'The Monogamy Optician', it's the shop-worn phrase 'I only eyes for you' that gets the once-over:

He sent for the nurse in the living mushroom apron.

She said,'Your peripheries will be surgically removed'.

I said, 'Do you never sneak a glimpse on the underground?'

She caught my words in the gas-mask like a baseball glove.

Or the exquisite comic timing of 'Bow Your Head and Cry', which takes the metaphor of love between two people 'dying' and it dramatizes it with ambulances, curious old women and the narrator's attempts to save face:

'It's not dead yet. Look, its legs are still moving.'

Just then its legs stopped moving.

There is playfulness here - as in 'Wedding Guest' with its epigraph 'to be read in an indignant voice'- but this is ultimately serious stuff. Bird never makes you smile inwardly without tying that smile into a knot, and hitting you with a sad, bittersweet truth. 'The Videos', for instance ('Someone gave me a video of your entire life'), is creepy, surreal and immediately engaging - the perfect opening poem - but it;s also as contorted (and as cruel) as a Nabokov narrative. At times the sadness is more redolent. The heartbreaking coda of 'The Doom,' for instance, where 'I am writing myself off.'repeats until fade. Or the fates of those said to show prommise in 'The Golden Kids', a series of final sentences.

He waited for his mum to die

then started playing drums in a band

called 'mad for the mad', wearing eyeshadow

[...]

He became the thought of his wife in a bar with a man

[...]

She went to build an orphanage on the other side of the planet

and left her goldfish behind. By goldfish, I mean children.

It's bold, original, emotionally raw work and there aren't many places to hide as a reader. Maybe in satire. You an feel momentarily superior to the poltroons and the gadflies of 'University Poetry Society' ('I've got more flair than most public school boys,/I've leapt train-barriers wearing a kimino...'), but you're ultimately uncomfortable as 'Poet in the Class', patronized by your audience's passive-aggressive teacher 'Aren't we lucky to be here?'.Ther is no comfort, for instance, in art; I have never seen the unavoidable irony of trying to "make a name for yourself' as a writer skewered so effectively as in a single line from 'Poetry as Competitive Sport': 'Firemen flip coins for a burnt child: 'heads I'm hero'. 'Peaked' (and it's in the shape of a peak) tackles artistic insecurity through childhood disappointments: 'my fifth birthday bombed./ "i preferred your early work", said a girl with measles'. on my third reading I was especially struck by a number of the shorter poems, which felt like ultra-condensed short stories:

When the shivers of shame have stopped, she said,

I'll just hop on a bus and go back to my husband

but first - this might sound odd - I want to sit

in the airing cupboard for a couple of hours.

'Closet Affair'

There's a kind of satire which says 'Isn't this person ridiculous?' But the best stuff, such as that found here, pokes you in the ribs as you laugh with it, your eyes shut, and says 'Uh sorry, but I was talking about you'. And it's much funnier-generously, bitterly, terrifyingly funny.