Shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection As always she is a poet of dark hilarity & telling social comment Shifting between poetic & 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 & inebriation rehab in a desert & adultery for atheists until finally Bird edges us out of danger revving on a wish'