Salt Modern Poets
2 total works
Reading Julia Bird's debut collection is like sorting out the contents of an up-ended jewellery box. Crafted formal poems tangle with the rhinestone razzle of looser, noiiser lyrics.
What price consolation, the poems ask, where is the green heart of a city, when does love stop and the work start?
The answers come in all sizes and styles. Images from popular culture, urban myth, religion and history, music, film and TV glow with a steady emotional truth. From spivs to flying monks, chalk horses to London boozers, Bird's imagination takes a circuitous route at a determined clip.
No gardener could ever grow an apple tree that blooms all year round, gifting both the flower arranger and the bee with twenty-four seven blossom. It’s an impossible dream, something we desire but can’t possess.
Only the poet can cultivate such a species. This poet seeds her collection with flowers, birds and insects that hover, uncaught, on the boundaries of reality. Consider this kingfisher, perched by a stream. Look again, and it might never have even existed. Another poem’s optical illusion shows you a rabbit – but tilt it sideways and it’s a human infant.
This is a book balancing concise and truthful lyric poems with longer, showier witty monologues. Dotted like stepping-stones throughout are a series of personal poems, all written to the length of the poet’s single breath. To read them aloud and embody their rhythms is to make them a part of you. These are poems requiring reader involvement to live.
Twenty-Four Seven Blossom follows Julia Bird’s well-received debut collection Hannah and the Monk, published in 2008. Five years on, we’re all more wind-blown and weathered, and though we’re beginning to suspect our trees might never flower twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, here’s a book to distract and console you while you wait.