Poetry review – AMBUSH AT STILL LAKE: Rennie Halstead enjoys being taken to unexpected places by Caroline Bird’s poems
Ambush at Still Lake
Caroline Bird
Carcenet Poetry 2024
ISBN 9781800174122.
£11.99
I had not expected to laugh out loud at Caroline Bird’s latest collection of poems, but the collection is shot through with wry humour, especially when Bird is writing about the adventures of small children. “Dream Job” gives us a glimpse of life with the toddler tyrant, a three-year-old beginning to assert himself, switching in a moment from compliant tot to bossy domestic dictator:
The three-year-old boss
of our imaginary café
is conducting his daily stocktake
But compliance from mother is suddenly not enough. He demands to know what has happened to the missing stock of carrots and cabbages, using the imaginary clipboard he is holding. The bunch of carrots the mother magics from her pocket are not good enough, even though they are fresh and crunchy. When the mother makes the phone call to the wholesaler, the tyrant boss demands to know why she thinks using her palm as a phone is likely to work, despite its success in previous international transactions: ‘That’s not the phone, that’s your hand’. Disaster is facing the shop. The ‘invisible shelves are all bare’ and the invisible customers are complaining, ‘Call this a tomato?” and are demanding refunds. With adult prescience. the toddler foresees the downfall of his financial adventure when he is taken away in handcuffs saying:
wasn’t it great
while it lasted though, Mum?
Didn’t we want
for nothing?
A little further on, in “Like a Toddler in the Midst”, the toddler has graduated from shopkeeper to student, and has learnt the first letter of his name – R. Of course, R is everywhere, and he spots every one, which makes conversation difficult. The letter R occurs on the news, posters, Tee shirts. He says the upper-case letter looks like a dinosaur: Rat, Russia, The Ritz. The lower-case letter is a worm’s head, and crops up in Greggs, Beer and Jupiter. This time, however, the consequences are less serious. Rather than be carted off to jail, the toddler is dispatched, given back to his other mum ‘like a bouncer / handing over my A-lister / to an elite security team’ and at last, every parent’s special moment, ‘going home to a quiet flat / crammed high with memorabilia.’
The toddler makes another appearance in “First Responder”. This time he is a fireman. He explains, patiently, that a fireman goes ‘around … with a fire hose, / putting … the water out,’. Mummy clearly is failing to understand, so he explains carefully, ‘as if teaching etymology to a monkey.’ Bird imagines him in later years, when, a parent himself:
he gets home after another
long shift of exploding fish
and slippery ladders
to be quizzed by his daughter who innocently asks if he will ever put all the water out.
Bird also explores the theme of love and marriage, with a similar wry take. In “Starter Marriage” she recalls all the miscellaneous people who turn up to weddings, the long-forgotten acquaintances you don’t want to offend or ignore. After the arrival of the smelly primary school ‘friend’, the body builders from dad’s porn films make an appearance, along with the man in mum’s secret photos and the baby-sitter who jumped off Flamborough Head. Star billing goes the BT operator who, feeling hurt that he was not immediately remembered, explains that he kept her waiting ‘in a call queue for forty minutes in 2007’ before announcing that the band was playing their song and they ‘danced together reminiscing under the marquee of stars.’
The hilarious “The Frozen Aisle” examines an outburst of lust in the supermarket. Getting straight to the point, the poem opens:
‘I’m in the mood’, she says,
slotting in a pound
to free the trolley.
Somewhat surprised, the partner responds:
‘What, here? In the Co-op?
Is there a toilet? Every aisle has CCTV?’
The lover wants more, suggesting they grab the essentials and dash home to bed, a sort of ‘Supermarket Sweep foreplay’. The conversation disintegrates into the surreal, with ‘glass fed cows’ and vegetable crisps. The speaker feels she is disappearing down a black hole, her brain ‘glowing like a radioactive cauliflower’ until she imagines herself on Judgement Day amongst the dead, slowly rising from their graves and queuing in the aisles waiting to check out. It’s a false alarm. The dead go back to their tombs, the moment of passion appears to have passed.
This rather downbeat look at life is picked up in “Downer”, where dad is imagined as rising from his grave, and, despite being exhausted, insists on telling stories of his experiences in the afterlife. He keeps nodding off mid-anecdote then resuming the story ‘like an animatronic fortune teller / with ill-fitting batteries / programmed purely to depress you’. His stories are full of references to the soil until the two women refuse to hear more. ‘Don’t you dare say soil!’ they exclaim and flee to the kitchen, sobbing into the tea towel. They don’t appreciate his tales ‘of indistinguishable muds / which had no doubt / enraptured the worms.’
A similar dark humour emerges in “For your eyes only”, where the writer fantasises about writing a suicide note, and the significance of the process. She imagines:
A hand-addressed pearlescent envelope
placed on a mantel mere seconds before
the chair was kicked.
thinking that at least on this occasion her writing will be read with attention, not skimmed through in a perfunctory manner. The suicide poem would be printed, circulated amongst the family, and would wish the survivors an ironically happy life.
“Best Room” picks up the theme of an abandoned life in a poem that has more to do with observation and less with humour. The poet describes the unused best room where everything is gleaming clean and carefully displayed in glass cabinets, with the pheasant staring from the woodland scene on a gilded plate and ‘the Ouzo from the long-ago / holiday to Corfu /will not be consumed /in this lifetime.’ And there is a sadness in the way:
the snow globes sit
oblivious
to the storm
sleeping inside them.
But the humour cannot be repressed for long. In “Cuckoo” the writer recalls taking the wrong direction at the swimming pool and arriving in the middle of an Aqua Fit class. She spends an hour moving her ‘legs / and arms in right-left ways / through treacly water’. She describes the perceived pointlessness of the accidental exercise where they move:
like wooden cuckoos inside
glued shut cuckoo clocks,
thwacking our little heads
against little doors
In “Ants” the writer describes using a vacuum cleaner to remove the ants who have invaded her kitchen cupboards. The ants are ‘errant mannerisms / like droplets of coffee in space’. They look like musical notes:
truant crotchets
who bunked off their orchestral scores
to avoid being reduced
to one note.
These ‘shrunken comet tails’ are picked off one by one. She imagines the survivors hiding under tins and meeting by the Cheerios where:
they hold a meeting
speak pheromonally
of the rapture
when the black hole opened
and they were not chosen
but left behind
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I opened this collection. These poems are skillfully written. They are full of conceits, taken to logical and comic lengths until they reveal the absurdities in everyday life. Whether talking about children, love or death, the way Bird takes words literally and to extremes triggers the laughter muscle. Yet, like all good comedy writing, the poems possess grains of truth that make the reader reflect on the human experience. A great collection, and a most enjoyable read.
Oct 3 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Caroline Bird
Poetry review – AMBUSH AT STILL LAKE: Rennie Halstead enjoys being taken to unexpected places by Caroline Bird’s poems
I had not expected to laugh out loud at Caroline Bird’s latest collection of poems, but the collection is shot through with wry humour, especially when Bird is writing about the adventures of small children. “Dream Job” gives us a glimpse of life with the toddler tyrant, a three-year-old beginning to assert himself, switching in a moment from compliant tot to bossy domestic dictator:
But compliance from mother is suddenly not enough. He demands to know what has happened to the missing stock of carrots and cabbages, using the imaginary clipboard he is holding. The bunch of carrots the mother magics from her pocket are not good enough, even though they are fresh and crunchy. When the mother makes the phone call to the wholesaler, the tyrant boss demands to know why she thinks using her palm as a phone is likely to work, despite its success in previous international transactions: ‘That’s not the phone, that’s your hand’. Disaster is facing the shop. The ‘invisible shelves are all bare’ and the invisible customers are complaining, ‘Call this a tomato?” and are demanding refunds. With adult prescience. the toddler foresees the downfall of his financial adventure when he is taken away in handcuffs saying:
A little further on, in “Like a Toddler in the Midst”, the toddler has graduated from shopkeeper to student, and has learnt the first letter of his name – R. Of course, R is everywhere, and he spots every one, which makes conversation difficult. The letter R occurs on the news, posters, Tee shirts. He says the upper-case letter looks like a dinosaur: Rat, Russia, The Ritz. The lower-case letter is a worm’s head, and crops up in Greggs, Beer and Jupiter. This time, however, the consequences are less serious. Rather than be carted off to jail, the toddler is dispatched, given back to his other mum ‘like a bouncer / handing over my A-lister / to an elite security team’ and at last, every parent’s special moment, ‘going home to a quiet flat / crammed high with memorabilia.’
The toddler makes another appearance in “First Responder”. This time he is a fireman. He explains, patiently, that a fireman goes ‘around … with a fire hose, / putting … the water out,’. Mummy clearly is failing to understand, so he explains carefully, ‘as if teaching etymology to a monkey.’ Bird imagines him in later years, when, a parent himself:
to be quizzed by his daughter who innocently asks if he will ever put all the water out.
Bird also explores the theme of love and marriage, with a similar wry take. In “Starter Marriage” she recalls all the miscellaneous people who turn up to weddings, the long-forgotten acquaintances you don’t want to offend or ignore. After the arrival of the smelly primary school ‘friend’, the body builders from dad’s porn films make an appearance, along with the man in mum’s secret photos and the baby-sitter who jumped off Flamborough Head. Star billing goes the BT operator who, feeling hurt that he was not immediately remembered, explains that he kept her waiting ‘in a call queue for forty minutes in 2007’ before announcing that the band was playing their song and they ‘danced together reminiscing under the marquee of stars.’
The hilarious “The Frozen Aisle” examines an outburst of lust in the supermarket. Getting straight to the point, the poem opens:
Somewhat surprised, the partner responds:
The lover wants more, suggesting they grab the essentials and dash home to bed, a sort of ‘Supermarket Sweep foreplay’. The conversation disintegrates into the surreal, with ‘glass fed cows’ and vegetable crisps. The speaker feels she is disappearing down a black hole, her brain ‘glowing like a radioactive cauliflower’ until she imagines herself on Judgement Day amongst the dead, slowly rising from their graves and queuing in the aisles waiting to check out. It’s a false alarm. The dead go back to their tombs, the moment of passion appears to have passed.
This rather downbeat look at life is picked up in “Downer”, where dad is imagined as rising from his grave, and, despite being exhausted, insists on telling stories of his experiences in the afterlife. He keeps nodding off mid-anecdote then resuming the story ‘like an animatronic fortune teller / with ill-fitting batteries / programmed purely to depress you’. His stories are full of references to the soil until the two women refuse to hear more. ‘Don’t you dare say soil!’ they exclaim and flee to the kitchen, sobbing into the tea towel. They don’t appreciate his tales ‘of indistinguishable muds / which had no doubt / enraptured the worms.’
A similar dark humour emerges in “For your eyes only”, where the writer fantasises about writing a suicide note, and the significance of the process. She imagines:
thinking that at least on this occasion her writing will be read with attention, not skimmed through in a perfunctory manner. The suicide poem would be printed, circulated amongst the family, and would wish the survivors an ironically happy life.
“Best Room” picks up the theme of an abandoned life in a poem that has more to do with observation and less with humour. The poet describes the unused best room where everything is gleaming clean and carefully displayed in glass cabinets, with the pheasant staring from the woodland scene on a gilded plate and ‘the Ouzo from the long-ago / holiday to Corfu /will not be consumed /in this lifetime.’ And there is a sadness in the way:
But the humour cannot be repressed for long. In “Cuckoo” the writer recalls taking the wrong direction at the swimming pool and arriving in the middle of an Aqua Fit class. She spends an hour moving her ‘legs / and arms in right-left ways / through treacly water’. She describes the perceived pointlessness of the accidental exercise where they move:
In “Ants” the writer describes using a vacuum cleaner to remove the ants who have invaded her kitchen cupboards. The ants are ‘errant mannerisms / like droplets of coffee in space’. They look like musical notes:
These ‘shrunken comet tails’ are picked off one by one. She imagines the survivors hiding under tins and meeting by the Cheerios where:
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I opened this collection. These poems are skillfully written. They are full of conceits, taken to logical and comic lengths until they reveal the absurdities in everyday life. Whether talking about children, love or death, the way Bird takes words literally and to extremes triggers the laughter muscle. Yet, like all good comedy writing, the poems possess grains of truth that make the reader reflect on the human experience. A great collection, and a most enjoyable read.