The Hat-Stand Union

Description

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.

Caroline Bird is an award-winning poet and the author of the collections "Looking Through Letterboxes," "Trouble Came to the Turnip," and "Watering Can." She is the recipient of the Eric Gregory Award and was short-listed for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and twice for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She was one of the five official poets at London Olympics 2012 and her poem, "The Fun Palace" is erected on the Olympic Site outside the main stadium.

'Bird is irrepressible; she simply explodes with poetry. The work erupts, spring-loaded, funny, sad, deadly - you don't know if a bullet will come out of the barrel or a flag with the word BANG on it.' --Simon Armitage 'Caroline Bird has always written wise, bitterly funny and intellectually bracing poems. What has developed over the course of four collections is a voice heartbreaking in vision while simultaneously consoling in its constant and inspired invention.' --Luke Kennard 'A carnival of characters spills out of these poems, chased by paparazzi, doing somersaults and cartwheels with language... Caroline Bird puts us on the inside looking deeper in, under the glittering skin to the place where laughter begins, where mothers are children, where people feel pain and speak in tongues, where tongues are knives and "Someone still has to stay here and die".' --Imtiaz Dharker