David Mason, 'The Poetry Circus', Hudson Review, Vol. LX, No. 1 (Spring 2007)


... One of the more remarkable books to come across my desk is the second collection by a twenty-year-old poet, England's Caroline Bird. At this rate, she is likely to stop writing poetry and disappear on some African gun-running trail before she's the age Keats was when he died, but I hope she sticks with writing. She has great verbal energy; and if I'll play the old fart by advocating restraint, I wouldn't do so if there weren't real vitality to restrain. Power comes from shaping, and Bird's lesser poems fail to follow through on clever premises - like lame clowning or stand-up that dies on the stage. 'Our Lollipop Lady' is a case in point, a poem that closes with a Ho-hum instead of an Ahhh.
What attracted me first to this Bird's book was its title: Trouble Came to the Turnip, perhaps a nod to the land of Nod. The title poem itself is Muldoonishly formal, palatable more than suss-able, I would say. Having come for the shape, though, I found one of her more shapeless rants, 'This Time Last Week', to be deeply compelling. Here are two stanzas extracted almost at random to give you a sense of her intelligence:

I want to write.
I want to be respected.
I want to be a respected writer.
I want to meet people who will inspire me
to write letters to them when I am forty
saying 'Thanks for inspiring me.'
But who are these people
in their ironed shirts and their reading glasses
and their well-funded quests?
Are you kidding me with this?
...
It wasn't that I met some very alarming people
with horrific backgrounds and unspeakable foregrounds.
I’m not a daddy's-girl nurse
limping back from the war with blood on her bonnet
and no more love for daddy.
I'm not saying I've seen the ruins of the world
And now my world is in ruins....

Going on for three more pages, it's a bit of a Howl for a new generation, and no doubt a crowd-pleaser when performed, but it's alive in ways some of our more laurelled bards couldn't dream of being. Two more favourites, 'Mope' and 'Chaining Bikes To This Girl Is Strictly Prohibited,' are among her punchier poems. I'd love to see her bring this kind of fire into a ring, where it could burn productively for many years to come.
...