The Air Year

"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."