Olympics Poet Caroline Bird: I was fighting drug addiction when I started this book

A poet who wrote for the 2012 Olympics has revealed that she started her latest collection when she was in rehab for drug addiction.

Caroline Bird, daughter of Southbank artistic director Jude Kelly, told the Standard she had been “on her knees” fighting her addiction while studying at Oxford a decade ago. The poet, now 30, also spoke about the need to tackle the shame surrounding addiction.

Bird was the youngest member of the Royal Court Young Writer’s Programme and had her first collection published at 15. In 2012 she was selected to write for the Olympics alongside former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

The poet, who lives in Brockley, finished the collection, In These Days Of Prohibition, last year and it was published last week — but its roots go much further back.

She said: “I started this book 10 years ago even though I have had four books out in between. I ended up in a rehab facility in the Arizona desert. I was given a questionnaire on, ‘Have you experienced suicidal thoughts’ and other questions like that. I took it back to my room and translated it into a poem and it ended up being the second poem in this book. I ended up there for the reason most people do, which is that I was an addict and didn’t like myself enough.

“In order to go to rehab in the middle of the desert you have to be on your knees. We are living in a time where people are able to talk about this stuff. Everyone ends up broken at some point in their lives because of something.

“I think it’s taken me a long time to be able to write even semi-plainly about those times because I was ashamed. I would fight to the death for anyone else [to be able to talk about their addiction], but it’s characterised by shame because it comes from a place of feeling like you don’t deserve to be happy. So that’s why the whole book is about negotiations between truth and shame.”

She added: “It’s a disease that’s characterised by secrecy. The book is called In These Days Of Prohibition because Prohibition was a time of secrets that everyone knows about but no one talks about, like when someone you know is mentally ill or struggling with addiction.”

Bird, who is performing her new poems on tour in Buenos Aires, praised her family for their “incredible support” and said she was now in a “completely different place” in her life. “If you’re trying to get well it’s like being behind a dirty windscreen and there are only so many poems you can write like that,” she said.

“Now I like writing in my little office surrounded by all my books going to extreme places in my head from the privacy of my own little room and not feeling like I’ve got to live extremely in order to write extremely.”

In These Days Of Prohibition is published by Carcanet at £9.99.