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Red Ellen (Paperback)
Caroline Bird
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R256
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'A working-class woman inside the walls of Westminster? If that is
not espionage, I do not know what is.' Forever on the right side of
history, but on the wrong side of life, Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson
is caught between revolutionary and parliamentary politics as she
fights for a better world. Battling to save Jewish refugees in Nazi
Germany; campaigning for Britain to aid the fight against Franco's
Fascists in Spain; leading two hundred workers in the Jarrow
Crusade against unemployment and poverty... she pursues each cause
with a passionate, reckless conviction. And yet - despite a life
spent running into the likes of Albert Einstein and Ernest
Hemingway, serving in Churchill's cabinet, having affairs with
communist spies and government ministers - she still finds herself,
somehow, on the outside looking in. Caroline Bird's play Red Ellen
is the remarkable true story of an inspiring and brilliant woman.
It was first produced by Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse and
the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2022.
Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns
familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the
everyday, Bird's protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets,
purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. At the
centre of the collection Bird evokes the sinister side of Camelot,
haunted by the experiments of its crazed tyrant-king. Bird's
characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying
the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves
somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union
is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise.
Caroline Bird is one of Carcanet's most popular poets. 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. Starting with Looking through Letterboxes in 2002 when
she was fifteen years old, she has published six Carcanet books,
culminating in The Air Year which was awarded the Forward Prize in
2020, shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize and the Costa Poetry
Prize, and a Book of the Year in the Telegraph, Guardian and White
Review. Rookie presents a formidable body of work composed over two
decades from one of the poetry world's most energetic and
consistently compelling voices.
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.
Caroline Bird at first appears to be a traditional story-teller.
But the stories she tells are suspended, charged with metaphor, and
built upon foundations strangely familiar: fairy tale, fantasy and
the sweet-bitter world of romance. The further one reads in her
haunted tales, the more remarkable becomes the variety of forms,
metres and rhythms she uses, and the clearer their appropriateness.
Things are not ever as they seem, and the poems bring us closer to
how the world 'really' is for this talented teenager. They work
metaphorically through our expectations and prejudices, which she
rearranges and reanimates ('with a step/in your dance, a forecast
for lightning'), or those that relate to the world of childhood ('I
came to see if you were okay') where language itself has never
quite got a grip. In the poems of Caroline Bird gender politics are
starkly redefined, as are the languages with which generations
communicate and fail to agree.
Shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2021. Winner of the 2020
Forward Prize for Best Collection. Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry
Award 2020. A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (February 2020). A
Telegraph Book of the Year 2020. A Guardian Book of the Year 2020.
The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension:
signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state
of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing,
undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at
hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and
step out into the air. Caroline Bird has five previous collections
published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of
Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the
Ted Hughes Award.
Caroline Bird's two earlier collections were acclaimed for their
exuberant energy, surreal imagination and passion - 'a bit of a
Howl for a new generation', wrote the "Hudson Review". "Watering
Can" celebrates life as an early twenty-something. The poems,
writes Caroline Bird, 'contain prophetic videos, a moon colonised
by bullies, weeping scholars, laughing ducks, silent weddings - all
the fertiliser that pours on top of your head.' The extraordinary
verve and compassion of her verse propels us into the anxiety of
new responsibilities. Raw but never hopeless, "Watering Can" has
comedy, wordplay and bright self-deprecation.
City State showcases the work of twenty-seven London writers
between the ages of 16 and 36. From hyperlinked walks of Battersea
bombsites and guerilla gardening projects to jagged urban lyrics
and dark hymns to the East End, City State presents a confident,
entertaining and truly diverse snapshot of the best new poetry from
London.
Based on ten years of surveys and excavations in Nyiyaparli country
in the eastern Chichester Ranges, north-west Australia, Crafting
Country provides a unique synthesis of Holocene archaeology in the
Pilbara region. The analysis of about 1000 sites, including surface
artefact scatters and 19 excavated rock shelters, as well as
thousands of isolated artefacts, takes a broad view of the
landscape, examining the distribution of archaeological remains in
time and space. Heritage compliance archaeology commonly focuses on
individual sites, but this study reconsiders the evidence at
different scales a at the level of artefact, site, locality, and
region a to show how Aboriginal people interacted with the land and
made their mark on it.Crafting Country shows that the Nyiyaparli
acrafted' their country, building structures and supplying key
sites with grindstones, raw material and flaked stone cores. In so
doing, they created a taskscape of interwoven activities linked by
paths of movement.
An angry orphan escapes a grey town on the back of a hurricane. She
lands in a mysterious country of tiny people and wicked witches,
where the trees carry bazookas, the crows recite slam poetry, and a
mouse can blow your head off. In just one day, this little girl
revolutionizes an entire nation. She brings freedom, and colour.
Her name is DOROTHY.
In this pitch-black comedy, fatal chemicals combine with ruthless
ambition, biscuits, bureaucracy and moral ambiguity. Set in the
near future, Britain has reinstated the death penalty. Relatives
are weeping in the witness gallery, the journalist clicks her pen
and the prison governor gives the thumbs up. Rapist murderer
Richard Sanger is strapped to the gurney. Chamber Piece depicts a
modern, British execution. How would it look? How would we feel?
And what could possibly go wrong?
A modern-day version of Euripides' anti-war play, The Trojan Women
has been rewritten and is set in a mother-and-baby unit of a
prison. The war is over. Beyond the prison walls, Troy and its
people burn. Inside the prison, the city's captive women await
their fate. Stalking the antiseptic confines of its mother and baby
unit is Hecuba, the fallen Trojan queen, whilst the pregnant Chorus
is shackled to her bed. But their grief at what has been before
will soon be drowned out by the horror of what is to come, as the
Greek lust for vengeance consumes everything - man, woman and baby
- in its path. This caustic and radical new version of Euripides'
classic tragedy comes from one of the UK's most exciting young
poets, Caroline Bird. It is an intense, gripping look at what
happens when the world collapses.
Shortlisted for the 2017 Ted Hughes Award. Shortlisted for the 2017
T.S. Eliot Prize. In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird's
fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark
hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and
vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is
re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her
poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces
behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These
days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab
in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us
out of danger, `revving on a wish'.
Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter, Clytemnestra must try to
stop him, Iphigenia must accept her fate, the Chorus must watch.
Ships lie dormant in harbours, and thousands of troops sit on the
shore, growing restless and unruly. Helen is gone, and pursuit of
her has been stalled by windless seas. To raise the winds to send
his fleet to Troy, Agamemnon is commanded by the gods to sacrifice
his daughter, Iphigenia. But his deceit of his wife, Clytemnestra
and the killing of his child, will end up tearing him and
everything around him to pieces. Euripides' story of a father moved
to murder his daughter, Iphigenia at Aulis, is one that has been
reinvented and retold anew throughout history. The Iphigenia
Quartet sees four of the UK's most exciting and radical playwrights
- Caroline Bird, Suhayla El Bushra, Lulu Raczka, and Chris Thorpe -
create explosive responses to this classical tragedy. Each play is
a reimagining this story of familial catastrophe from the differing
perspectives of the key characters in the play: Agamemnon,
Clytemnestra, Iphigenia and the Chorus.
This practical guide analyzed the career switches of 6,347 people
over 50 in nearly 300 occupations. As the only record of its kind,
it has horizon-broadening suggestions for people of any age who
want to switch to work that better fits their talents, interests,
and current lifestyle. Hundreds of switchers tell why they moved,
what they had to learn, how they got their present jobs, and what's
good and bad about them.
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