Ambush at Still Lake

by Caroline Bird

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 83
Rating:

Synopsis:

Caroline Bird's new poems show us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending. This is a collection about marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery in which a recurring dream is playing out: a world where mums impale themselves on pogo-sticks, serial killers rattle around in basements, baby monitors are haunted by someone else's baby and, through it all, love stays and stays like a stationary rollercoaster that turns out to be the scariest, most thrilling ride in the amusement park.

I admit to mostly picking up Caroline Bird’s Ambush at Still Lake for the pulpy cover, when browsing the National Poetry Library’s collection via random tags. Her editor’s reaction does sum things up pretty well:  “It is bleak, repellent and hilarious in an American Psycho-ish way. Hectic and vivid.”

I wasn’t a huge fan overall, though I recognised the poems as well written and well structured. Some of the ideas behind them are clever, a little amusing, but I just didn’t enjoy the grotesquerie of some of them, like the woman swallowing her kid’s toys and the descriptions of all that…

Not a collection for me, but I still find the pulpy cover amusing, and there were a few poems that did speak to me.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)