Rookie

Selected Poems

Caroline Bird

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781800171862
• eBook ISBN:
  9781800171879
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023. Caroline Bird is one of Carcanet's most popular poets. Her startling instinct for metaphor, the courage of her choice of subjects and the integrity of her witness, set her apart: a poem is a risk, and it has to be a risk worth taking for the poet and for the reader. Starting with Looking through Letterboxes in 2002 when she was fifteen years old, she has published six Carcanet books, culminating in The Air Year which was awarded the Forward Prize in 2020, shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize, and a Book of the Year in the Telegraph, Guardian and White Review. Rookie presents a formidable body of work composed over two decades from one of the poetry world's most energetic and consistently compelling voices.

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FROM ‘THE AIR YEAR’ (2020)

139

PRIMITIVE HEART

You are the size of an orange seed and

developing a heart. Same, baby, same.

Your pre-heart is made of two tubes

which must fuse together now into one

primitive structure. Tell me about it.

By Friday your neural groove will herald

the beginning of your brain. Snap.

I’m a chickpea, bud, a tadpole,

pre-me. Within a week you’ll double

in scope. I can’t compete with that level

of personal growth. You’ll outdo me, pip.

I’m unfused. Sketchy. Two heart strings

fumbling to combine. I’m not supposed to

dread completion, baby, am I? Yours nor mine.

140

THE GROUND

You land on a ridge, six-feet down the cliff

and believe you have fallen from the dread

summit and survived, you think,

this is the ground.

until you notice the larks passing at eye-level,

drop a cufflink and fall

fifty-feet into the open palm of another ridge,

deeper in, scratched, clothes torn,

you’ve lost a shoe but you think

this is the ground,

I can bake that lasagne now

till a kite gets snagged in your hair,

your feet meet a plunging carpet

now you’re hanging by your necklace

from a branch thinking

this is the ground,

let’s buy a puppy

as you sit in your bracken chair,

as you fall in your chair like a lopped flower head

face-planting – Yes! Ground! – in a tree,

wind-burnt from momentum, whip-

lashed by your own screams, oops, then oops,

oops, straddling a lamp-post, a pillar, a shed, each time

believing this is the ground, believing

you’ve survived, falling, landing, falling out,

who knows how long you’ve been travelling

down this thing, incrementally, held in the loosening-

tightening fist of a giant with a featureless face.

Thud. At last

I can put up that shelf. Make that baby.

You lie and let your bones heal, looking up 141

at the distance, experiencing plateau

for the first time, cold, hard, real, the opposite

of air. You shake like a prodigal astronaut.

I could build a house on this, you think,

staggering off.

142

SANITY

I do kind gestures. Remove my appendix.

I put my ear to a flat shell and – nothing.

I play the lottery ironically. Get married.

Have a smear test. I put my ear to the beak

of a dead bird – nothing. I grow wisdom

teeth. Jog. I pick up a toddler’s telephone,

Hello? – No answer. I change a light bulb

on my own. Organise a large party. Hire

a clown. Attend a four day stone-walling

course. Have a baby. Stop eating Coco-Pops.

I put my ear right up to the slack and gaping

bonnet of a daffodil – . Get divorced. Floss.

Describe a younger person’s music taste as

‘just noise’. Enjoy perusing a garden centre.

Sit in a pub without drinking. I stand at the

lip of a pouting valley – SPEAK TO ME!

My echo plagiarises. I land a real love plus

two real cats. I never meet the talking bird

again. Or the yawning hole. The panther

of purple wisps who prowls inside the air.

I change nappies. Donate my eggs. Learn

a profound lesson about sac...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• From ‘LOOKING THROUGH LETTERBOXES’ (2002)
• From ‘TROUBLE CAME TO THE TURNIP’ (2006)
• From ‘WATERING CAN’ (2009)
• From ‘THE HAT-STAND UNION’ (2012)
• From ‘IN THESE DAYS OF PROHIBITION’ (2017)
• From ‘THE AIR YEAR’ (2020)
• Afterword
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright