In These Days of Prohibition

By Caroline Bird

Shortlisted for the 2017 Ted Hughes Award.

Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize.

In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, 'revving on a wish'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Release date: Jul 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781784104795

Caroline Bird

Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. Her 2020 collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, was published in 2002 when she was fifteen. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. As a playwright, Bird has been shortlisted for the George Devine Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her theatre credits include: The Trojan Women (Gate Theatre, 2012), The Trial of Dennis the Menace (Purcell Room, 2012), Chamber Piece (Lyric Hammersmith, 2013), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Northern Stage, 2015), The Iphigenia Quartet (Gate Theatre, 2016) and Red Ellen (Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse, Royal Lyceum Theatre and York Theatre Royal, 2022). She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics.