Watering the words - Keith RichmondWatering Can by Caroline Bird (Carcanet, £9.95)Caroline Bird arrives, as William Wordsworth had it in Intimations of Immortality, trailing clouds of glory. She was born in 1986, brought up in Leeds, went to school in York and is now reading English at St Catherine's College, Oxford. She was a winner of the Foyles Young Poet of the Year Award in 1999, when she was 13, and the Peterloo Poets Competition for Young Poets three years later, when she also picked up an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, was published in 2002 and her second, Trouble Came to the Turnip, appeared in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Plays she has written have had rehearsed readings at the Royal Court, student productions in Oxford and performances on the Edinburgh Fringe.Like the poems in Trouble Came to the Turnip, which was favourably reviewed on these pages, there is an extraordinary energy about the pieces in this collection which were written, she says, over three years, 'time divided between studying English and building my life as a poet.' Her studies have inspired a few of the poems in this collection: Perspectives is a version, albeit a very loose one about young drug addicts, of the Old English lament Deor and Bright Winter Mornings in Oxford Town, her first sonnet, 'also happens to be one of my rudest poems to date': 'Remember when I drank that rum and black / with dirty lips so dumb and kissable? / Now I’m another gown upon the rack. / My sheets are bleached by the invisible. / After I bathe, I neatly shave my crack. / I dress. I take my library books back.'On display here are Bird's characteristic and surrealistic flights of fancy – '[I] started seeing things: saints with erections / playing netball with elephants'; 'and swans / – as I said – were exploding by the river' – lots of fresh, sharp images – 'the chip boy wore a gutted face / sanctified in grease'; 'Narcissus, a grown man, / with stretchmarks on his heart' – and, in poems like Head Girl, a wry sense of humour.Watering Can, she says, shows 'what I believe in, as well as what I’m fighting against. Essentially, it’s a collection about trying to be happy. So, in a way, it’s the saddest book I've ever written. It's about watching my friends, and myself, turn into adults, about the gap between who you are and who you want to be.' It's a more grown up, sophisticated and polished collection: 'Tomorrow / giant watering cans will drip from cranes / into our respective gardens where our respective / partners will be dancing, wet with innocence.'
