Hera Lindsay Bird

Book excerpt: This impressive debut has established Hera Lindsay Bird as a good girl with many beneficial thoughts and feelings. With themes as varied as snow and tears, the poems in this collection shine with the fantastic cream of who she is, juxtaposing many classical and modern breezes. Bird turns her prescient eye on love and loss, and what emerges is like a helicopter in fog or a bejewelled Christmas sleigh, gliding triumphantly through the contemporary aesthetic desert. This is at once an intelligent and compelling fantasy of tenderness, heartbreaking and charged with trees without once sacrificing the forest.