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'.#
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One year is blank on my curriculum vitae.- A SURREAL JOKE
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(@Carcanet, 15 July 2017, e-book, 64 pages, borrowed from @natpoetrylib)
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I'm a fan of the poet and really enjoyed In These Days of Prohibition. I like the dark, yet humorous tone of the poems in this collection. The themes are also quite dark in tone but also easy to relate to. Every poem was a surprise. I never knew what to expect when I turned the page.