Trouble Came to the Turnip

Description

Following "Looking Through Letterboxes", her first collection (2002), Caroline Bird was acclaimed as a vivid and precocious new talent. "Trouble Came to the Turnip" confirms her originality as she strikes out again in new directions, taking nothing for granted. Her poems are ferociously vital, fantastical, sometimes violent, almost always savagely humorous and self-mocking. Caroline Bird's world is inhabited by failed and (less often) successful relationships, by the dizzying crisis of early adulthood, by leprechauns and spells and Miss Pringle's seven lovely daughters waiting to spring out of a cardboard cake, and the turnip.

Caroline Bird was born in 1987. She grew up in Leeds and attended the Steiner School in York. She moved to London with her family in 2001. She has won the Poetry Society's Simon Elvin Young Poet of the Year Award two years running (2000, 2001) and she was shortlisted for the Poetry Review's Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (2001). Her work has appeared in PN Review and Poetry Review. Caroline Bird has recently received an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection from Carcanet, Looking Through Letterboxes (March 2002), is a topical, zesty and formally delightful collection of poems built on the traditions of fairy tale, fantasy and romance, from a distinctly personal point of view. Bird's work also features in New Poetries III (Carcanet August 2002).

Reviews of Caroline Bird's previous collection: '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 'Her poems burst with linguistic energy, and the book is profligate with striking lines and images.' - Times Literary Supplement