In her new collection, Zoë Skoulding isolates the disappearing sounds in an ever noisier world, sounds that are ebbing away from both landscape and language itself. The results look closely into how ‘a sentence reverses itself between two pairs of eyes’, or ‘the distance drifted by a word shaken loose from border controls’. Eery, uneasy and always teetering on the edge, the poems move between haunting interiors – including a fractured sonnet sequence on the coincidence of room numbers – to breathtaking natural vistas.
Zoë Skoulding’s previous collections include Remains of a Future City (2008; ISBN 9781854114754) and The Mirror Trade (2004; ISBN 9781854113665), both published by Seren. Her poems also appear in the anthologies Women’s Work (Seren, 2009; ISBN 9781854114303), Identity Parade (Bloodaxe, 2010; ISBN 9781852248390), Infinite Difference (Shearsman, 2010; ISBN 9781848610996), The Ground Aslant (Shearsman, 2010; ISBN 9781848610811) and Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt, 2012; ISBN 9781907773259). She lives in north Wales, where she teaches at Bangor University and edits Poetry Wales.