In These Days of Prohibition

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'.

Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. Her first collection of poems, Looking Through Letterboxes, was published when she was fifteen. She was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002. In 2008 and 2010 she was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and in 2012 was one of five official poets of the London Olympics.