The Air Year, by Caroline Bird: an anti-fairytale kind of love and the tragedy of getting old

My biggest vice as a reader is getting into books without knowing anything about them beforehand. Most of the times they end up meeting what my personal preconceptions were to begin with. Sometimes I get disappointed. And, sometimes, it results in reading the first few poems of a collection thinking that it’ll be all about queer love and romantic scenarios, and then suddenly a woman is masturbating on a torpedo in the middle of the wood and you realize “actually, let’s see where this is going…”. In the end, The Air Year is just like the kind of sentiment that Caroline Bird describes in its pages: unsettling and unpredictable.

The collection opens with a quote by the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer: “In the middle of the forest there’s an unexpected clearing that can only be found by those who have gotten lost”. This sentence anticipates the constant subtle feeling that characterizes the entire collection: a sense of seeking, of wandering, of looking almost desperately for a form of relief, an “unexpected clearing”. We could say, metaphorically, a deep breath of fresh air. So, this collection is about a quest. A quest that has two faces: a desire and a reckless abandonment to love, and the despair and the challenges of growing up (and, especially, of getting old). All of this, in a world that is basically described to us as doomed.

This first quote, at the beginning of the collection, also anticipates a rhetoric and a kind of scenario recurring in its pages, introducing us to this fairytale-like world made of forests, nature, hidden spots and stolen kisses, that we can find in most of the poems. And love is there, constantly.

Both love and this fairytale aesthetic should give the Narrating Voice – and us, as a reflection – the so much desired comfort. But they don’t. The more we proceed into the book, the more the themes and stories become darker and darker. They turn into, we could say, anti-fairytales, and instead of giving us relief and comfort, they leave us with this guttural feeling of uneasiness. The scenarios that Bird describes are occasionally so explicit and raw as to reach the borderline of horror (like in ‘Emotional Reasoning’ and in ‘Naphthalene Heights’).

The question arises naturally, then: does love actually work as that mean of relief that the Narrating Voice is so desperately seeking?

The answer, in this collection, is no 90% of the time. Bird describes a love that consumes you, in all of its forms. Even parental love is seen as corrosive (as shown in ‘Little Children’). She does that by using a very original and incoherent tone, that constantly shifts between the romantic and the pleading, to the raw and the morbid, back to a witty irony that makes even the most tragic of scenes enjoyable. And on top of it, Bird’s poetry is highly surreal. She isn’t afraid to experiment with either the form or the content of her poems. The best example of that is ‘Surrealism for beginners’. Here, Bird seems to bring us into this dreamlike irrational scenario where humanity realises that reality is a movie, like a revisitation of The Truman Show, and everyone is absolutely fine with it. And even though Bird ends the poem with a romantic tone, focusing back on the theme of love, it’s impossible to ignore the disturbing premises of the poem. This is just an example of how unpredictable and chaotic her poetry is.

As in ‘Surrealism for beginners’, most of her poems are dreamlike scenarios. And through them, in a matter of a few pages, she narrates a story of growth and the everyday reality of ordinary life.

They say that when you die, your whole life unravels in front of your eyes in the span of a few seconds. This is what reading The Air Year felt like. When we first meet the Narrating Voice, she’s a young, closeted queer woman, getting comfortable with her sexuality and – arguably – dealing with the challenges of a first love. A great example of this is the poem ‘Dive Bar’, which, prior to this collection, was published in the anthology Proud, with other stories and poetry by LGBTQ+ authors. It’s not clear if the relationship that Bird writes about is always the same in the course of the collection, but even so, we can see it maturing, challenging the Narrating Voice with the struggles of an adult relationship. And while love remains the main theme, Bird addresses other topics – more or less subtly – such as sexism and the historical role of women (that she tackles with witty irony in ‘The Golden Age’) or even climate change (as in ‘Morality play’). She also often mentions or alludes to drugs and addiction, and we know that that is a theme really close to her personal experience. In 2012 she admitted to the Standard that she had struggled with a severe addiction during her years at Oxford, and spoke about the need to tackle the shame surrounding addiction. She did that in some of her other works, especially in her collection In These Days of Prohibition, shortlisted in 2017 for the T. S. Elliot poetry prize. It’s undeniable how this experience of her life conditioned her work, even when she’s not writing purely about that.

These themes come out especially towards the end of the collection, where the poems become even darker, death becomes a recurring presence, and – with the elements mentioned before, like drugs, linguistic devices, and the recur of the apocalyptic image of a dying world – we get an idea of decay, of something that’s coming to an end. The Narrating Voice realizes that she’s getting old, and she’s unconsciously terrified by that. And this brings her to the end of the journey of a lifetime.

As I mentioned before, the experimental form and structure of the collection adopted by Bird are incredibly interesting. Some of the poems detach completely from the tradition, tackling different genres that theoretically shouldn’t have much to do with poetry in the first place. I’m referring in particular to poems such as ‘Emotional Reasoning’, written in the form of a newspaper article. Others, such as ‘The Factory Floor’ and ‘The Girl Who Cried Love’, can be considered almost extremely short stories. And while I appreciated the effort in trying something new and playing with the form and the language, I did find it sometimes deceiving. I feel like in some of the poems – and I noticed it especially in ‘Rookie’ and ‘Sanity’ – her attempt to Surrealism ends up overshadowing the core and the meaning behind the poem itself, leaving the reader more confused than else. But the absurdity of these particular poems does work as comic relief, which may or may not have been the intention of the author, but either way it does help to break the tone of the collection, making the whole even more chaotic than it already is.

We also talked briefly about the style at the beginning of this review, but I’d like to address that more into the specific. Bird’s writing could easily be placed in the category of Poetic Impressionism. In art, Impressionists (such as Monet and Renoir) based their technique on the use of their five senses to replicate a scene from ordinary life on the canvas. Bird does the same. Her poems are full of visual references, sounds, breaths, air, even smells, and reading her poems transports you into the scene itself, making you feel almost overwhelmed by all these stimuli. Also, for most of the collection, nature plays a big part in the scenarios that the poet describes. Both of these elements remind me of the Decadent poetry of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. French and Italian authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D’Annunzio used Poetic Impressionism and naturalistic imagery to describe the decay of the modern world. As we said, attention to themes such as substance abuse, getting old and death are common in both Decadent and Bird’s poetry. As it’s the theme of erotica and sexual desire. An example of this is Bird’s poem ‘Nancy and the Torpedo’, where the Narrating Voice and her companion experience this erotic moment in the wood, and the wood itself seems to almost take part in the act. The two women experience a moment of full fusion with nature, in a way that really recalls the poem ‘Rain in the pinewoods’ by Gabriele D’Annunzio.

I don’t necessarily think that Bird’s poetry is deliberately inspired by the Decadents, but I do think that the comparison between the two can really give us an interesting reading key to Bird’s writing. The Decadents wrote in a fundamental historical transition era, where the certainties of the western world were being questioned by the frenzy of the Second Industrial Revolution and the rising tension in Europe preceding World War I. Bird published The Air Year in 2020, in a likewise fragile historical period. In the words of Peter Raynard – in his review of the collection in the blog Poetry School – “At the time Bird wrote the collection, it was (and still is) the climate crisis, the breakdown of liberal democracy, or the final squeeze of capitalism into every pore of society. But now, with Covid-19, it takes on a greater, darker prescience.” All of these aspects are reflected in Bird’s poetry, in the themes she tackles, in her unique voice, and even in the nature that she describes, always accompanied by an element of modernity that ‘pollutes’ the scenes (as the torpedo in the woods, or the plastic in ‘Morality Play’).

This collection is the manifesto of the new generations, who are conscious of the fragility of their future and consequently scared of it, but at the same time who are learning to embrace and explore their sexuality and the more hedonistic aspects of life, even when they go out of the heteronormativity. Her witty and dark sense of humor perfectly aligns with an audience of readers used to the same kind of humor on social media, without being simple and straightforward like the more mainstream instapoets such as Rupi Kaur or Cleo Wade. That wouldn’t necessarily be a negative thing, but understanding the surrealism and the chaos of The Air Year will most definitely take the readers more than one quick scam, and it will certainly leave them with more (mostly unanswered) questions.

Like I said at the beginning of this review, I had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading this collection. Now I can confidently affirm that The Air Year was nothing of what I could have ever expected, and I loved it for it.