By Times Literary Supplement | Created at 2024-11-20 16:49:32 | Updated at 2024-11-21 18:19:15
1 day ago
Ambush at Still Lake is the seventh collection of poems by Caroline Bird, and her first since The Air Year, which won the Forward prize for best collection in 2020. This book’s themes include misunderstandings; truth and lies; addiction; family and parenthood; and sexuality, love and marriage.
Bird’s great skill as a storyteller is in action. A common thread throughout these poems is the loss of control, with characters and speakers finding themselves on the back foot in situations nobody could expect. In “Vial” the speaker receives a call from the IVF clinic, three years after the birth of their child, and is told that the sperm donor went on to become a serial killer. The poem resolves, uneasily, with the revelation that the quoted ID number of the vial of sperm was off by one digit.
These poems are full of fantastically vivid images. In one standout poem, “We’ve All Been There”, a game of truth or dare unravels as the players make increasingly extreme confessions to one-up each other. The speaker imagines drawing a chalk circle “to mark some kind of mystic wall / between me and this orgy of awful / confessors, cheeks greasy with laughter, eyes / black as melanite”. The enjambment of the lines adds a sense of breathless fright.
Death is all over this book like a photo-bombing skeleton, smiling. “Downer” is a darkly funny poem in which the speaker’s father returns from the grave and keeps talking about different types of soil, with stories that “had no doubt enraptured the worms”. His children, at once bored, angry and afraid, tell him: “One more soil story and we’ll wish you were dead again”.
Ambush at Still Lake also has some touching and endearing poems about parenthood – including one about a child saying something funny, a genre that is rarely so successfully pulled off. In “First Responder”, the speaker’s toddler says a fireman goes around “putting water out”. This leads the poem into a daydream in which the now grown-up fireman spends a day putting out bubble baths and the sea itself, before returning home to his own child and trying to explain his job to her.
The darkest poems here have as much heart as the sweetest, sometimes playing out like anxious dreams about loved ones. As Bird says in her message to her wife in the book’s acknowledgements, “fears of loss are love poems too”.
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