Book description
Following Looking Through Letterboxes, her first collection (2002),
Caroline Bird was acclaimed as a vivid and precocious new talent.
Trouble Came to the Turnip confirms her originality as she strikes out
again in new directions, taking nothing for granted. Her poems are
ferociously vital, fantastical, sometimes violent, almost always
savagely humorous and self-mocking. Caroline Bird's world is inhabited
by failed and (less often) successful relationships, by the dizzying
crisis of early adulthood, by leprechauns and spells and Miss
Pringle's seven lovely daughters waiting to spring out of a cardboard
cake. And the turnip.
'Her poems burst with linguistic energy, and the book is profligate
with striking lines and images.' - Times Literary Supplement 'The tone
fuses knowing innocence and integrity; some poems are faux naif with a
ballad lilt, others are sad, funny surreal; all are studded with fresh
imaginative insights.' - Ruth Padel, Financial Times Caroline Bird was
born in 1986. She grew up in Leeds and attended school in York before
moving to London in 2001. She won the Poetry Society's Simon Elvin Young
Poet of the Year Award two years running (1999 and 2000) and won an Eric
Gregory Award in 2002. Her poems have appeared in PN Review, Poetry
Review, The North magazine and in Carcanet's New Poetries III anthology
(2002). Her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, was published
by Carcanet in 2002. Her second collection, Trouble Came to the Turnip,
appeared in September 2006. Caroline has given poetry readings at the
Royal Festival Hall, Cheltenham Festival and Ledbury Festival. Her poems
and a specially-commissioned short story, Sucking Eggs, have been
broadcast on Radio Four. In Autumn 2008 Caroline was shortlisted for the
prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under 30.
