Carcanet Press - The Hat-Stand Union

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Contents
Awards
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Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird’s protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. At the centre of the collection Bird evokes the sinister side of Camelot, haunted by the experiments of its crazed tyrant-king. Bird’s characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise.

1 MYSTERY TEARS

Sealing Wax

Username: specialgirl2345

Mothers

Snow Hotel

Unacceptable Language

Mystery Tears

Method Acting

The Dry Well

A Dialogue between Artist and Muse

Hey Las Vegas

Genesis

9 Possible Reasons for Throwing a Cat into a Wheelie Bin

Day Room

Faith

Dolores

There Once Was a Boy Named Bosh

Thoughts inside a Head inside a Kennel inside a Church

The Only People in Paradise

Fantasy Role-Play

Empty Nest

Spat

How the Wild Horse Stopped Me

The Island Woman of Coma Dawn

2 THE TRUTH ABOUT CAMELOT

Prologue

I. A Confident Local Youth

II. Some Last Words

III. Urchin Who Is Stalking Guinevere’s Scullery Maid

IV. Camelot Estate Agent

V. Exiled Journalist Disguised as Shrub

VI. Arthur’s Crab-Boy Vision Faces Scalpel Practicalities

VII. Crab Quotes

VIII. You

IX. Raving King Speech

X. Lancelot’s Poetry Reading in Smoky Bar

XI. Arthur, Arthur, Arthur...

XII. A Disgruntled Knight

3 SEA BED

Damage

This Was All About Me

2:19 to Whitstable

Break-up Party

Two Cents

Run

Sea Bed

Public Detectives

Facts

To Whom It May Concern

Screening

The Promises

Say When

Kissing

What Shall We Do With Your Subconscious?

Limerence

Medicine

Izzy

Conqueror

Atheism

I’m Sorry This Poem Is So Painful

The Stock Exchange

The Last House

The Fun Palace

Marriage of Equals

Corine

Caroline Bird has seven previous volumes published by Carcanet. Her sixth 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 TS Eliot ... read more

Awards won by Caroline Bird Long-listed, 2023 The Polari Book Prize (Rookie) Winner, 2023 A Cholomondeley Award
Short-listed, 2021 The Polari Book Prize
(The Air Year) Winner, 2020 The Forward Prize for Best Collection (The Air Year) Short-listed, 2020 Costa Poetry Award
(The Air Year) Short-listed, 2017 The Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry (In These Days of Prohibition) Short-listed, 2017 The T.S. Eliot Prize (In These Days of Prohibition) Commended, 2004 Christopher Tower Poetry Prize Winner, 2000 Simon Elvin Young Poet of the Year Award Winner, 1999 Simon Elvin Young Poet of the Year Award Winner, 2002 Eric Gregory Award Winner, 2004 Peterloo Poets Competition (16-19 year-olds) Winner, 2003 Peterloo Poets Competition (16-19 year-olds) Winner, 2002 Peterloo Poets Competition (16-19 year-olds) Short-listed, 2001 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize Short-listed, 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers

Praise for Caroline Bird 'These poems are skillfully written. They are full of conceits, taken to logical and comic lengths until they reveal the absurdities in everyday life. Whether talking about children, love or death, the way Bird takes words literally and to extremes triggers the laughter muscle. Yet, like all good comedy writing, the poems possess grains of truth that make the reader reflect on the human experience. A great collection, and a most enjoyable read.'

Rennie Halstead, London Grip
'Caroline Bird's latest work, Ambush At Still Lake, evokes the nostalgic charm of classic Hollywood cinema, weaving together elements of cartoons, westerns, and black-and-white movies. However, beneath its cinematic veneer lies a deep emotional resonance, illuminating the transformative power of love. Through its masterful storytelling, Bird deftly illustrates how a singular moment can serve as a poignant testament to the enduring capacity for renewal within the human heart.'

Roger Robinson

'Bird's poetry is characterised by a restless transformative energy that can make the most mundane things seem rich and strange; if this is rookiness it is an art of its own.'

Tiffany Atkinson, The Poetry Review
'These are poems that go off like a great big rocket in the sky.'

David Wheatley, the Guardian

'A stream of fun, juxtaposing disorientating pictures to form an abstract map of everything it means to fall in and out of love.'

Belinda Stiles, Stand Magazine

'Full of surprises at every turn, The Air Year demonstrates Bird's intuitive grasp of language, her fascination with hidden selves, mental health and the possibility of healing. These poems attest to her ability to fuse a distinctive voice with surreal, dramatised narrative that straddles reality and imagination.'

Jennifer Wong, Magma

'Although the collection was published last February...we will likely turn to it in the future when seeking words for the stagnation and embattled optimism of 2020 as a whole.'

Mary Anne Clark, Times Literary Supplement

'It is one of the most generous and open-hearted books of the year.'

Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian Best Poetry Books of 2020

'The Air Year impressively distills existential truths into its rollicking lines... Bird's writing is both ambitiously expansive and intimate as a heartbeat.'

Khairani Barokka, Under the Radar

'All shiny and exciting... Many of Bird's speakers are in a free-fall of existential despair... searching for a moment of happiness that feels uncomplicated, and can last'

Jenna Clake, Poetry London

'Bird's poetry is undeniably funny [...] Readers will fall in love with [the] writing for her fresh and strange imagery.'

Oxford Poetry Library, where Bird's collection was Book of the Month for September 2020

'As a reader, The Air Year gives me hope that maybe we can write and read our way out of whatever mess is splashed in our faces as we float around this increasingly weird world - as impossible as that seems.

There is no doubt about how prescient The Air Year is - even the title could act as a sobriquet for the pandemic. So, we are left with everything up in the air and, as we sit tight in our homes, we're all just hoping that, if we ever land, there'll be something worth landing on.'

Peter Raynard, The Poetry School

'Bird is direct about her desires and her shortcomings in her poems, refusing to shy away from the details of sex, mental health, suicide ideation or addiction. At the same time, there is lightness and whimsy in the chaos'

Diva Magazine

'The Air Year is surreal and satirical but beneath all this levity, lies a candid vulnerability.'

PBS Spring 2020 Bulletin

'Her phrasemaking is sublime... it's superb'
Tristram Fane Saunders, February Telegraph Book of the Month 2020
'Caroline Bird is a poet like no other, always prepared to shower us in meteors of linguistic playfulness, in a frightening game of hide and seek. We don't always need to understand every explosion of emotion to feel the power and passion. These poems are screenshots, epic movies, ground-breaking nuggets of prose, and something else we can't even find words for. The Air Year is a fantastic, intimate, disturbing and beautiful tour de force.'
Pat Edwards, London Grip
'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
'Caroline Bird's is an unquestionably vigorous and original voice'
Suzannah V. Evans, The TLS
'Bird is a master of bleak humour interlaced with wry social commentary.'
Poetry London
'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) 'Achieves serious funniness by filtering mental illness and addiction through the prism of pop-surrealism.'
Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times
'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
'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
'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 shorlist newsletter
'Her poems burst with linguistic energy.'
Stephen Knight, Times Literary Supplement 'An astonishingly assured piece of work.'
Ruth Padel, Financial Times 'What an original captivating and spellbinding voice. Bird is fearless like 'the girl who dropped her ice-cream down a volcano and leaped in after it'. She's dangerous and witty too with a rare quality of imagination. This is a wonder, a beautifully written book of poems.'
Lemn Sissay
'Her poems burst with linguistic energy, and the book is profligate with striking lines and images.'
Times Literary Supplement
'The tone fuses knowing innocence and integrity; some poems are faux naif with a ballad lilt, others are sad, funny surreal; all are studded with fresh imaginative insights.'
Ruth Padel, Financial Times

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The Hat-Stand Union Caroline Bird 10% off eBook (EPUB) 10% off Paperback Categories: 21st Century, British, Women Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Jan 2013) 9781847777638 £9.95 £8.96 Paperback (80 pages) (Pub. Jul 2012) 9781847771643 £9.95 £8.96 Digital access available through Exact Editions To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions. Description Author Contents Awards Reviews Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird’s protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. At the centre of the collection Bird evokes the sinister side of Camelot, haunted by the experiments of its crazed tyrant-king. Bird’s characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise. 1 MYSTERY TEARS Sealing Wax Username: specialgirl2345 Mothers Snow Hotel Unacceptable Language Mystery Tears Method Acting The Dry Well A Dialogue between Artist and Muse Hey Las Vegas Genesis 9 Possible Reasons for Throwing a Cat into a Wheelie Bin Day Room Faith Dolores There Once Was a Boy Named Bosh Thoughts inside a Head inside a Kennel inside a Church The Only People in Paradise Fantasy Role-Play Empty Nest Spat How the Wild Horse Stopped Me The Island Woman of Coma Dawn 2 THE TRUTH ABOUT CAMELOT Prologue I. A Confident Local Youth II. Some Last Words III. Urchin Who Is Stalking Guinevere’s Scullery Maid IV. Camelot Estate Agent V. Exiled Journalist Disguised as Shrub VI. Arthur’s Crab-Boy Vision Faces Scalpel Practicalities VII. Crab Quotes VIII. You IX. Raving King Speech X. Lancelot’s Poetry Reading in Smoky Bar XI. Arthur, Arthur, Arthur... XII. A Disgruntled Knight 3 SEA BED Damage This Was All About Me 2:19 to Whitstable Break-up Party Two Cents Run Sea Bed Public Detectives Facts To Whom It May Concern Screening The Promises Say When Kissing What Shall We Do With Your Subconscious? Limerence Medicine Izzy Conqueror Atheism I’m Sorry This Poem Is So Painful The Stock Exchange The Last House The Fun Palace Marriage of Equals Corine Caroline Bird has seven previous volumes published by Carcanet. Her sixth 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 TS Eliot ... read more Awards won by Caroline Bird Long-listed, 2023 The Polari Book Prize (Rookie) Winner, 2023 A Cholomondeley Award Short-listed, 2021 The Polari Book Prize (The Air Year) Winner, 2020 The Forward Prize for Best Collection (The Air Year) Short-listed, 2020 Costa Poetry Award (The Air Year) Short-listed, 2017 The Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry (In These Days of Prohibition) Short-listed, 2017 The T.S. Eliot Prize (In These Days of Prohibition) Commended, 2004 Christopher Tower Poetry Prize Winner, 2000 Simon Elvin Young Poet of the Year Award Winner, 1999 Simon Elvin Young Poet of the Year Award Winner, 2002 Eric Gregory Award Winner, 2004 Peterloo Poets Competition (16-19 year-olds) Winner, 2003 Peterloo Poets Competition (16-19 year-olds) Winner, 2002 Peterloo Poets Competition (16-19 year-olds) Short-listed, 2001 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize Short-listed, 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers Praise for Caroline Bird 'These poems are skillfully written. They are full of conceits, taken to logical and comic lengths until they reveal the absurdities in everyday life. Whether talking about children, love or death, the way Bird takes words literally and to extremes triggers the laughter muscle. Yet, like all good comedy writing, the poems possess grains of truth that make the reader reflect on the human experience. A great collection, and a most enjoyable read.' Rennie Halstead, London Grip 'Caroline Bird's latest work, Ambush At Still Lake, evokes the nostalgic charm of classic Hollywood cinema, weaving together elements of cartoons, westerns, and black-and-white movies. However, beneath its cinematic veneer lies a deep emotional resonance, illuminating the transformative power of love. Through its masterful storytelling, Bird deftly illustrates how a singular moment can serve as a poignant testament to the enduring capacity for renewal within the human heart.' Roger Robinson 'Bird's poetry is characterised by a restless transformative energy that can make the most mundane things seem rich and strange; if this is rookiness it is an art of its own.' Tiffany Atkinson, The Poetry Review 'These are poems that go off like a great big rocket in the sky.' David Wheatley, the Guardian 'A stream of fun, juxtaposing disorientating pictures to form an abstract map of everything it means to fall in and out of love.' Belinda Stiles, Stand Magazine 'Full of surprises at every turn, The Air Year demonstrates Bird's intuitive grasp of language, her fascination with hidden selves, mental health and the possibility of healing. These poems attest to her ability to fuse a distinctive voice with surreal, dramatised narrative that straddles reality and imagination.' Jennifer Wong, Magma 'Although the collection was published last February...we will likely turn to it in the future when seeking words for the stagnation and embattled optimism of 2020 as a whole.' Mary Anne Clark, Times Literary Supplement 'It is one of the most generous and open-hearted books of the year.' *Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian* Best Poetry Books of 2020** 'The Air Year impressively distills existential truths into its rollicking lines... Bird's writing is both ambitiously expansive and intimate as a heartbeat.' Khairani Barokka, Under the Radar 'All shiny and exciting... Many of Bird's speakers are in a free-fall of existential despair... searching for a moment of happiness that feels uncomplicated, and can last' Jenna Clake, Poetry London 'Bird's poetry is undeniably funny [...] Readers will fall in love with [the] writing for her fresh and strange imagery.' Oxford Poetry Library, where Bird's collection was Book of the Month for September 2020 'As a reader, The Air Year gives me hope that maybe we can write and read our way out of whatever mess is splashed in our faces as we float around this increasingly weird world - as impossible as that seems. There is no doubt about how prescient The Air Year is - even the title could act as a sobriquet for the pandemic. So, we are left with everything up in the air and, as we sit tight in our homes, we're all just hoping that, if we ever land, there'll be something worth landing on.' Peter Raynard, The Poetry School 'Bird is direct about her desires and her shortcomings in her poems, refusing to shy away from the details of sex, mental health, suicide ideation or addiction. At the same time, there is lightness and whimsy in the chaos' *Diva Magazine* 'The Air Year is surreal and satirical but beneath all this levity, lies a candid vulnerability.' PBS Spring 2020 Bulletin 'Her phrasemaking is sublime... it's superb' *Tristram Fane Saunders, February Telegraph* Book of the Month 2020** 'Caroline Bird is a poet like no other, always prepared to shower us in meteors of linguistic playfulness, in a frightening game of hide and seek. We don't always need to understand every explosion of emotion to feel the power and passion. These poems are screenshots, epic movies, ground-breaking nuggets of prose, and something else we can't even find words for. The Air Year is a fantastic, intimate, disturbing and beautiful tour de force.' Pat Edwards, London Grip '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 'Caroline Bird's is an unquestionably vigorous and original voice' Suzannah V. Evans, The TLS 'Bird is a master of bleak humour interlaced with wry social commentary.' Poetry London '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) 'Achieves serious funniness by filtering mental illness and addiction through the prism of pop-surrealism.' Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times '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 '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* '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 shorlist newsletter 'Her poems burst with linguistic energy.' Stephen Knight, Times Literary Supplement 'An astonishingly assured piece of work.' Ruth Padel, Financial Times 'What an original captivating and spellbinding voice. Bird is fearless like 'the girl who dropped her ice-cream down a volcano and leaped in after it'. She's dangerous and witty too with a rare quality of imagination. This is a wonder, a beautifully written book of poems.' Lemn Sissay 'Her poems burst with linguistic energy, and the book is profligate with striking lines and images.' Times Literary Supplement 'The tone fuses knowing innocence and integrity; some poems are faux naif with a ballad lilt, others are sad, funny surreal; all are studded with fresh imaginative insights.' Ruth Padel, Financial Times You might also be interested in: Bevel William Letford The Ninjas Jane Yeh	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! The Carcanet Blog One Little Room: Peter McDonald read more Collected Poems: Mimi Khalvati read more Invisible Dog: Fabio Morbito, translated by Richard Gwyn read more Dante's Purgatorio: Philip Terry read more Billy 'Nibs' Buckshot: John Gallas read more Emotional Support Horse: Claudine Toutoungi read more
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