Author Description

<p>This is a hard-to-categorise collection - poems, prose poems, tiny gems of memoir. I don't think it matters - imagine Pearl, the jewel at the centre of each piece as the perfect flaneuse - taking you by the hand and opening up the marvellous, the mysterious and the beautiful within the humdrum.</p><p>Julia Bird's powers of observation are razor-sharp; these pieces read like perfect icons where every detail is imbued with leaf gold. In "Liquid Pearl,"</p><p> when the Mayor reopens the lido <br> Pearl takes to the water<br> in a blow-up chair the shape<br> of a size fourteen flamingo <br> There is magic, magic realism, another way of seeing at the core of so much of this work. Describing a night club in "Violette Pearl," Bird writes: <br> ... but how the haze, the synthesis<br> of dry ice and Silk Cut smoke, <br> looks for all the world like<br> bluebells in a birch wood seen<br> from the far edge of a distant field.</p><p>Take a walk with Pearl - you may never see the world in quite the same way.</p>