Carcanet online book launch: Rookie by Caroline Bird

We’re excited for the launch of Rookie: Selected Poems by Forward Prize-winning poet Caroline Bird, when she will be reading from the new collection, out with Manchester-based Carcanet Press, and chatting about it with fellow poet Rachel Long, author of Forward Prize-shortlisted My Darling From The Lions.

Caroline Bird’s most recent collection, The Air Year, was awarded the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2020. It was also shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize, and it was a “book of the…” in the Telegraph, Guardian and The White Review.

Starting with Looking Through Letterboxes in 2002 when she was just 15 years old (followed up with Trouble Came to the Turnip, 2006, then Watering Can, 2009), Caroline Bird has published six books with Carcanet, and is one of the publishing house’s most popular poets. Her fourth collection, The Hat-Stand Union, was described by Simon Armitage as “spring-loaded, funny, sad and deadly”.

Caroline Bird’s most recent collection, The Air Year, was awarded the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2020. It was also shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize, and it was a “book of the…” in the Telegraph, Guardian and The White Review. She was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2017 and the Ted Hughes Award 2017 for her fifth collection, In These Days Of Prohibition (published July 2017), and she has previously been shortlisted the Dylan Thomas Prize – twice, in 2008 and 2010.

Rookie: Selected Poems came out earlier this year and presents a formidable body of work composed over two decades from one of the poetry world’s most energetic and consistently compelling voices. Carcanet say: “Her startling instinct for metaphor, the courage of her choice of subjects and the integrity of her witness, set her apart: a poem is a risk, and it has to be a risk worth taking for the poet and for the reader.”

Caroline Bird’s poems have been published in several anthologies and journals including Poetry Magazine, PN Review, Poetry Review and The North magazine. Several of her poems and a commissioned short story, ‘Sucking Eggs’, have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 3. She was one of the five official poets at London Olympics 2012. Her poem ‘The Fun Palace’, which celebrates the life and work of theatre director Joan Littlewood (Caroline hails from a theatrical background and also writes plays), is now erected on the Olympic Site outside the main stadium.

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.