In These Days of Prohibition

Reviews / Votes

'The poems of In These Days of Prohibition are disquieting: institutionalised, hedonistic, vacuous and nihilistic. The collection takes a hard look at contemporary society but is, ultimately, uplifting. If Brett Easton Ellis wrote poems, I'd like to think they'd be poems like these.'

John Field in the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist newsletter 'The poems in this, Bird's fifth collection, explode on the page, bristling with a vision of sanity within madness, order within chaos. She has the ability to describe a tortured soul in a twenty-first century manner, bringing humour, contemporary idiom and irony into the work.'

Dundee University Review of the Arts 'Since she published her debut aged 15 in 2002, Bird's witty writing has been wrongly dismissed in some quarters as lightweight. This brave eighth collection (a slant account of her year in rehab) proves those critics wrong from its first page.'

?Tristram Fane Saunders, The Daily Telegraph 'Achieves serious funniness by filtering mental illness and addiction through the prism of pop-surrealism.'

Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times 'Caroline Bird's In These Days of Prohibition is equally pleasurable and disturbing, because it understands the genuinely strange ground on which we must build our thoughts and our emotions. In work of great and frequently comic poise it captures moments of absolute loss of control, and absolute freedom. We recognise that sustained unsettling comic virtuosity is the startling agent by which we engage with such loss, such freedom.'

W.N Herbert (Chair of the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize Judging Panel) 'Bird is a master of bleak humour interlaced with wry social commentary.'

?Poetry London 'Caroline Bird's is an unquestionably vigorous and original voice'

Suzannah V. Evans, The TLS 'If for Wallace Stevens poetry was the 'Supreme Fiction', Robert Lowell argued 'why not say what happened?' Bird, however, grabs Confessionalism by the throat to produce a surreal if formally controlled autobiography.'

Julian Stannard, The Poetry Review