Winner of the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2020. A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (February 2020). A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020. A Guardian Book of the Year 2020. The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air. Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award.
"That’s it. Yes, it picks up on the energy and passion of the first year of a relationship; it’s a book of such hurtling wild energy that it’s difficult to find landing places in it. That’s partly what the poetry is concerned with: we’ve been launched into flight, or freefall, and we’re looking for somewhere to land. How do we find landing places for ourselves? It makes use of everything that poets do: finding measures and making forms. It’s very absorbing. Caroline Bird talks about finding clearings in forests—she gives her reader that sense of searching through a forest, and suddenly coming to a clearing. That’s your place of clarity, the place where you land. “She picks up on the energy and passion of the first year of a relationship” She’s a surrealist. It’s very much in dialogue with the modernist surrealists, experimenting with errant and outlandish patterns of association. But the exuberance of imagery—daffodils dunked in milk pails and windmills in vacuum-packed villages—is held in balance with a sort of melancholy and despair, in a way that is very mobile. You can never quite pinpoint its tone. You can go back to it and find it falls slightly differently with every reading. It’s full of grief and shame. It’s quite vertiginous, as if you’re on this tightrope over deep wells. If you stop, you might fall—but it’s not complaining, it’s accepting the dangerousness of being alive. So we were excited about the tumbling acts of this book."
