Poet Hera Lyndsay Bird Speaks to a Generation

Millions are turning to poetry in response to a year of troubling news stories – with previously excluded voices, like Thames-born writer Hera Lyndsay Bird, in the field now going viral, the Guardian’s Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett reports.

“‘Hera Lindsay Bird has attracted the biggest hoo-ha with a poetry book I can recall,’ wrote one reviewer of the New Zealand-born poet, whose recently released debut collection has become a cult bestseller in her home country.

“And rightly so: Bird’s frank, outrageous writing – see, for example ‘Keats is Dead so Fuck Me From Behind’ – is in turns bleakly hilarious and peppered with pitch-perfect similes (‘the days burn off like leopard print’; ‘Love like Windows 95’). It has made me, like many others, more excited about poetry than I have been in a long time.

“She may be half a world away, but her voice seems to speak to women of my generation regardless of geography. ‘I love it when people who don’t usually like poetry like my poetry,’ she told an interviewer recently. ‘It’s a mean joke, like tricking someone into joining an improv troupe.’

“One poem, entitled Monica after the character from the 90s sitcom Friends, has been so popular that the website that published it, The Spinoff, received more hits than it has had in its history.

“That her poetry is creating such excitement isn’t just about Bird’s talent and the way she speaks to a younger audience, although those are of course major factors. As Bryan Appleyard noted in a piece for the Sunday Times, the medium is seeing a significant revival of interest that has the potential to reach a level not seen since the Victorian era, and much of it thanks to internet culture and the 24-hour news cycle.”

Bird is a graduate of the International Institute of Modern Letters and won the 2011 Adam Prize for best folio.

Her debut self-titled collection is published by Victoria University Press.

Original article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, The Guardian, July 28, 2016.