REVIEW: CAROLINE BIRD’S ‘AMBUSH AT STILL LAKE’
By Stella Backhouse
Paul Simon had just turned thirty-four when he released Still Crazy After All These Years. As someone whose own thirty-something heyday is an increasingly distant memory, I could raise a patronising smile that at so tender an age, Simon seemingly considered himself such a veteran. Indeed from my current vantage point, the title song’s anthemic chorus appears less purely random and more deliberate reassurance to the fans who had grown up with Simon and were now entering early mid-life alongside him, that the responsibilities of encroaching maturity need not define them. Craziness (in the benign joie-de-vivre sense of ‘exuberant’ or ‘madcap’ rather than the strictly medical sense) is a virtue of particular appeal to the young. (Trust me, I’ve seen it from both ends.) You might have to act like you’re older, Simon told his audience, but you can be as bonkers as ever underneath. And yet…for all the song’s defiant bravado, listen carefully and catch uncertainty waiting in the wings. At four in the morning the singer is lonely, directionless, stuck in the past, possibly suicidal. Sure – he has kept faith with the creed of his youth. But if that’s victory, it rings pretty hollow.
Caroline Bird’s 2024 collection Ambush at Still Lake also inhabits this same squeezed, turn-of-the-tide zone where ‘cool’ is an increasingly unavailable identity. As time runs out, age-inappropriate former wildness is unwillingly discarded and new boringness reluctantly tried for size. Identity has become a scarily empty beach. ‘The New People’ is a poem about a rehab clinic. The meeting of opposing impulses is almost audible as the narrator clocks incoming clients as she herself checks out and “for a second The Future eyeballs/The Past but neither can tell who’s who”. But rather than a deafening clash of narratives, the ambiance here is a backwash of mutual confusion. On the one hand, the unvoiced fear is ‘what if I don’t escape my past?’; on the other, it’s ‘what if I do?’
This ambivalence is evident throughout the collection. Bird subverts the mundanities of grown-up life by mentally re-writing them as corny all-American action movies. But while her fantasies function as her personal security blanket – confirming that age has not dimmed her inner craziness – they constantly threaten to tip over into the embarrassing denial of reality hinted at in ‘The Murder House’. Here, an off-their-head (on drugs?) narrator desperately shouts through the letter box at their trying-to-be-sensible lover: “’Sweetheart. Please. You’re living in a murder house’”. To which the lover replies “’Then why aren’t I dead?’”
The question of what constitutes ‘age-appropriate’ behaviour stalks the collection. Bird plays with conventional expectations in poems like ‘Dream Job’, in which her four year-old is led away in handcuffs after fraudulent dealings at his pretend shop and ‘Last Rites’, in which her grandmother’s dying wish is to dangle her baby great-grandson from her apartment window by his ankle. Self-consciously positioning herself as the ‘adult in the room’ in these scenarios, Bird’s discomfit and regret at her changed status leaks through in her son’s parting words “Wasn’t it great/while it lasted though, Mum?/Didn’t we want/for nothing?”. In ‘First Responder’, Bird again maps herself onto her child, creating confusion about her self-image while simultaneously exploring the process of becoming adult. The poem riffs on the boy’s cute misunderstanding of the role of the fire-fighter, which he believes is “putting…the water out”. Within a few lines, he miraculously grows from pre-schooler to intrepid adult with a child of his own to ask the awkward questions: “’Will you ever be finished/though Daddy?/Will you ever put all the water out?’”
Ambush at Still Lake is written from the point of view of someone still young enough to view ageing with alarm. No one my age could have written it because for us, it’s already happened. Nonetheless, this is a poignant and self-parodying collection that captures a key moment in any life and asks important questions about what it means to be adult. That said, it could be argued that for many of today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings, agonising about whether or not you want to be an adult is a bit of a luxury. For those without the means to buy their own home or even escape the parental home, questions about the nature of adulthood have, perhaps, a slightly different focus.
Ambush at Still Lake can be purchased online, direct from publisher Carcanet Press (currently with 10% off!) as well as from other retailers.