Overview

Taking its title from a line in Hôtel du Nord, a 1938 film of doomed romance, Do I Look Like an Atmosphere? brings background into the foreground, and asks us to pay close attention to that which we inhabit and change. In these poems the atmosphere is under our skin and in our bones. Reviewing Skoulding’s previous collection, Joey Connolly observed that her work is ‘clever, but it is also pleasurable as poetry, and its theory arises from within.’ Here again, Skoulding’s ingenious, innovative forms evokea natural world newly vulnerable to human actions. Faced with the inseparability of the non-human world from the destructiveness of human activity, these poems trace their connection across times and places: the humble mussel connects the coast of north Wales with fishing communities world-wide, while the calcium of its shell is found in the limestone of the Norman castles that colonised Wales.

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9781800175389

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Reviews

'Zoe Skoulding's new poems inhabit places of acute attention and listening on an earth whose nature is changing, and human nature along with it. Here speak is listen too, is hear; the land and waters we cross with the poet urge us not to serendipity but to a place of thinking, all of us ""knots in time... translating light"" in ""the university of trees"".' Erin Moure 'Skoulding's songs unfold the curriculum of our polycrisis and the noise of our dreams... The music is insurgent and hits the fibre of our being with vibratory impact - Skoulding knows how to pitch to the spot where the echo comes back.' Jonathan Skinner

‘Zoë Skoulding’s new poems inhabit places of acute attention and listening on an earth whose nature is changing, and human nature along with it. Here speak is listen too, is hear; the land and waters we cross with the poet urge us not to serendipity but to a place of thinking, all of us “knots in time… translating light” in “the university of trees”.’ Erín Moure ‘Skoulding’s songs unfold the curriculum of our polycrisis and the noise of our dreams… The music is insurgent and hits the fibre of our being with vibratory impact – Skoulding knows how to pitch to the spot where the echo comes back.’ Jonathan Skinner

Author Information

Zoe Skoulding's six previous collections of poems include A Marginal Sea (Carcanet, 2022), shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year, following most recently by A Revolutionary Calendar (Shearsman, 2020) and Footnotes to Water (Seren, 2019), which won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award. She is co-editor, with Katherine M. Hedeen, of Poetry's Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations (Shearsman, 2022), and her critical publications have explored poetry's relationships with place, listening, translation and ecology. She is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University, and lives on Ynys Mon / Anglesey.

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