About

Zoë Skoulding is a poet and literary critic interested in translation, sound and ecology. She is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University. Her latest collection of poems is A Marginal Sea (Carcanet Press, 2022). Her previous collections (published by Seren Books) include The Mirror Trade (2004); Remains of a Future City (2008), shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year; The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (2013), shortlisted for Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry; and Footnotes to Water (2019), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2020. In 2020 she also published The Celestial Set-Up (Oystercatcher) and A Revolutionary Calendar (Shearsman). She received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2018 for her body of work in poetry.

Her critical work includes two monographs, Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities (2013), and Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric (2020). She has recently directed Transatlantic Translation: Poetry in Circulation and Practice Across Languages (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2020-22), following the network Poetry in Expanded Translation 2017-2018. From 2009 to 2011 she was, in partnership with Literature Across Frontiers, director of Metropoetica, a collaborative project on translation, gender and city space. She was Editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales 2008-2014 and co-founded the (North) Wales International Poetry Festival in 2012.

publications

Latest collection: A Marginal Sea, Carcanet Press, October 2022

“This is a book that makes you feel, as it lengthens your wingspan, glad to be alive.”
Forrest Gander

Carcanet launch reading for A Marginal Sea by Zoë Skoulding, presented by Harriet Tarlo: https://youtu.be/_z6BrTzoydg

Zoë Skoulding talks about A Marginal Sea from her home town of Porthaethwy/Menai Bridge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1drnKIoGuE&ab_channel=CarcanetPress

A Marginal Sea

“Zoë Skoulding’s magisterial new book A Marginal Sea offers us a pentathlon of innovative forms in which we find expressionist typography, haibun, calendrical prognostications, a poignant soliloquy by the bird-haunted Odysseus, and striking passages of sheer lyric beauty:
. . . All the same notes
and suddenly it’s a different song, the birds with
open beaks and a music that would eat me whole
This is a book that makes you feel, as it lengthens your wingspan, glad to be alive.”
Forrest Gander

Footnotes to Water

Footnotes to Water imagines a river as a transverse section, cutting through urban and rural spaces, connecting places that are themselves in flux.


Winner of Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2020

A Revolutionary Calendar

'With expert grace and subversive panache, Zoë Skoulding has written a collection of 360 five-line poems gathered into twelve sections of thirty poems each—a form that replicates that of the Republican Calendar created in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. Each “month” of poems uses the five-line format differently; each of the individual poems responds to a single element of the phenomenal world and all are attentive to the rounds that phenomena follow. Skoulding’s magnificent Revolutionary Calendar is very much a book of turns and chart of changes. It is a book for every year.'

Lyn Hejinian

Museum of Disappearing Sounds

'This is a poetry that tunes itself brilliantly through tensions out in the world and between bodies, precisely rung in its gaps and inscriptions. Words and sounds "shaken loose from border controls" are discovered in forgotten rooms, on the point of disappearance. Strange dust in the throat. A haunted and beautiful collection, which brings a reader's skin into contact, despite the desertion of language and its museums, with the continual necessity of song.'

Carol Watts

Remains of a Future City

'These are mesmerising and unsettling poems. In an unstable world, objects speak a language of constant change. There's a split-second balance; for now the slates hold. The language is, as it needs to be, spare, tough, elegant. Zoë Skoulding brings cool and penetrating insights to disrupt quotidian vision.'

Wendy Mulford

The Mirror Trade

'The alchemical processes of mirror-making, its "furnaces and transubstantiations, / amalgams of tin and quicksilver" become a guiding metaphor for the poet. Cityscapes are haunted by memories both personal and historic. Formally inventive, restless, inquisitive, these poems capture our attention by subverting expectations.'

Carol Rumens

Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric

Examining poetry as mediated by performance, technology and translation, this book discovers how contemporary poetry has been re-energised by the influence of recorded sound and influenced by the creative methods that emerged with it. It offers an exploration of contemporary poetry’s acoustic contexts, moving beyond traditional analysis of poetic form to consider the social, political and ecological dimensions of a poem's sounds and silences.

Contemporary Women's Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities

This book focuses on the role of the city, and its processes of mutual transformation, in poetry by experimental women writers. Readings of their work are placed in the context of theories of urban space, while new visions of the contemporary city and its global relationships are drawn from their innovations in language and form.

The Celestial Set-Up

'This poetry is a finely-tuned gaze at the particularity of who we are and what we see.'

Ian Brinton

A Marginal Sea

“Zoë Skoulding’s magisterial new book A Marginal Sea offers us a pentathlon of innovative forms in which we find expressionist typography, haibun, calendrical prognostications, a poignant soliloquy by the bird-haunted Odysseus, and striking passages of sheer lyric beauty:
. . . All the same notes
and suddenly it’s a different song, the birds with
open beaks and a music that would eat me whole
This is a book that makes you feel, as it lengthens your wingspan, glad to be alive.”
Forrest Gander

Footnotes to Water

Footnotes to Water imagines a river as a transverse section, cutting through urban and rural spaces, connecting places that are themselves in flux.

Winner of Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2020

A Revolutionary Calendar

'With expert grace and subversive panache, Zoë Skoulding has written a collection of 360 five-line poems gathered into twelve sections of thirty poems each—a form that replicates that of the Republican Calendar created in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. Each “month” of poems uses the five-line format differently; each of the individual poems responds to a single element of the phenomenal world and all are attentive to the rounds that phenomena follow. Skoulding’s magnificent Revolutionary Calendar is very much a book of turns and chart of changes. It is a book for every year.'

Lyn Hejinian

Museum of Disappearing Sounds

'This is a poetry that tunes itself brilliantly through tensions out in the world and between bodies, precisely rung in its gaps and inscriptions. Words and sounds "shaken loose from border controls" are discovered in forgotten rooms, on the point of disappearance. Strange dust in the throat. A haunted and beautiful collection, which brings a reader's skin into contact, despite the desertion of language and its museums, with the continual necessity of song.'

Carol Watts

Remains of a Future City

'These are mesmerising and unsettling poems. In an unstable world, objects speak a language of constant change. There's a split-second balance; for now the slates hold. The language is, as it needs to be, spare, tough, elegant. Zoë Skoulding brings cool and penetrating insights to disrupt quotidian vision.'

Wendy Mulford

The Mirror Trade

'The alchemical processes of mirror-making, its "furnaces and transubstantiations, / amalgams of tin and quicksilver" become a guiding metaphor for the poet. Cityscapes are haunted by memories both personal and historic. Formally inventive, restless, inquisitive, these poems capture our attention by subverting expectations.'

Carol Rumens

Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric

Examining poetry as mediated by performance, technology and translation, this book discovers how contemporary poetry has been re-energised by the influence of recorded sound and influenced by the creative methods that emerged with it. It offers an exploration of contemporary poetry’s acoustic contexts, moving beyond traditional analysis of poetic form to consider the social, political and ecological dimensions of a poem's sounds and silences.

Contemporary Women's Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities

This book focuses on the role of the city, and its processes of mutual transformation, in poetry by experimental women writers. Readings of their work are placed in the context of theories of urban space, while new visions of the contemporary city and its global relationships are drawn from their innovations in language and form.

The Celestial Set-Up

'This poetry is a finely-tuned gaze at the particularity of who we are and what we see.'

Ian Brinton

reviews

Review by Ali Graham, Stride
Review by Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence
Review by The London Grip
Review by Thomasin Collins, DURA
Review by Judy Darley, SkyLightRain
Review by Bebe Ashley, PNR

Critical Perspectives

Barry, Peter, ‘Zoë Skoulding: Devolutionary Reading’ in Matthew Jarvis, ed. Devolutionary Readings: English-Language Poetry and Contemporary Wales (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017).

Butchard, Dorothy, ‘Secrecy, Surveillance and Poetic “Data Bodies”’, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 10:1, 2019, pp. 1–27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/bip.731

Chamberlain, Louise ‘“The unfenced border”: Boundaries, Borders and Thresholds in the Poetry of Zoë Skoulding and Patrick McGuinness’, International Journal of Welsh Writing in English,Vol 2, 2014, pp. 83–105.

Entwistle, Alice, Poetry, Geography, Gender: Women Rewriting Contemporary Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013). https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/poetry-geography-gender/

Rogers, Sam, ‘Wires, mirrors, tricks of the light: Zoë Skoulding and lyric poetry’, in Sam Rogers, ed. Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, Yearbook of English Studies, Vol 51, 2021, pp. 265-286. https://doi.org/10.5699/yearenglstud.51.2021.0265

Talks and Conversations

Entwistle, Alice, ed., In Her Own Words: Women Talking Poetry and Wales (Bridgend: Seren, 2014) https://www.serenbooks.com/productdisplay/her-own-words-women-talking-poetry-and-wales

Devolved Voices https://wordpress.aber.ac.uk/devolved-voices/media/interview-zoe-skoulding/

Interview about A Marginal Sea on Front Row, Radio 4, November 2022 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001dnhx

Lecture: ‘Resounding Bodies: Ecopoetics, Listening and Translation’, University of Warsaw EcoLab: Non-Anthropocentric Cultural Subjectivity, May 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb0r9TAjR4Q&ab_channel=Dobra55

A Marginal Sea at Silesius Poetry Festival Wrocław, May 2023 https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=144657001928708

Translating Poetry, discussion at Kerala Literature Festival, January 2024

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translations

Poetry in translation

https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/building-site-6396

Teint

Zoë Skoulding's poems in this volume celebrate and mourn the 'lost', buried Parisian river La Bièvre. With French translation by Jean Portante.

You Will Live in Your Own Cathedral

Zoë Skoulding [trilingual (En/Cz/D) booklet and audio CD with Alan Holmes, Richard Hopewell, Huw Jones, Monika Rinck, Eva Klimentova, Alexandra Buchler] (Seren 2009).


Some copies still available – message via contact form.

Las Habitaciones y Otros Poemas

Poemas de Zoë Skoulding traducidos al español por Víctor Rodríguez Núñez y Katherine Hedeen (Universidad de Costa Rica, 2018).


Some copies still available – message via contact form.

Teint

Zoë Skoulding's poems in this volume celebrate and mourn the 'lost', buried Parisian river La Bièvre. With French translation by Jean Portante.

You Will Live in Your Own Cathedral

Zoë Skoulding [trilingual (En/Cz/D) booklet and audio CD with Alan Holmes, Richard Hopewell, Huw Jones, Monika Rinck, Eva Klimentova, Alexandra Buchler] (Seren 2009).


Some copies still available – message via contact form.

Las habitaciones y otros poemas

Poemas de Zoë Skoulding traducidos al español por Víctor Rodríguez Núñez y Katherine Hedeen (Universidad de Costa Rica, 2018)


Some copies still available – message via contact form.

Poems in Spanish translation

Debajo la Hierba. Arriba la Bóveda del Cielo: Ventanas al Paisaje Británico [in Spanish translation], ed. and trans. Adriana Díaz Encisco (Mexico: Elefanta Editorial, 2015).

Nuestra Tierra de Nadie: Poesía Galesa Contemporánea [in Spanish translation] eds. and trans. Victor Rodriguez Nuñez and Kate Hedeen (Mexico: La Otra, 2015); (Colombia: Ladrones del Tiempo, 2019).

Poems in Italian translation

Extract from ‘The Rooms, trans. Marco Simonelli, Terza Pagina http://www.raffaellieditore.com/terza_pagina/poesia_inglese_zoe_skoulding
Year 2 – N° 04, 2017.

Anthology

Katherine Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding, eds. Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations (Bristol, UK: Shearsman Books, 2022) and Latrobe, PA, USA: Eulalia Books, 2023).

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Katherine-M-Hedeen-and-Zoe-Skoulding-eds-Poetrys-Geographies-p476837988

https://www.eulaliabooks.com/catalog/poetrys-geographies-a-transatlantic-anthology-of-translations

Translations

Metropoetica

What does writing poetry have in common with walking in the city? In translating poetry, what lost paths, dark alleys and chance connections are encountered? How do these change the maps by which cities are known and by which new poetries may be discovered?

In Reality: Selected Poems by Jean Portante, trans. Zoë Skoulding

'In reality, reality is ghosted by a multiplicity of forms of energy & energies of form it is the poet’s job to reveal & hide in the double play of his languages’ hide & seek. Jean Portante is a master at just that chassé-croisé of language & meaning, of real ghosts & ghostly realities. One "In Reality" can (& does) hide another. Read on & in.' – Pierre Joris

Jerome Rothenberg Pologne/1931

Traduction par Jean Portante et Zoë Skoulding

Metropoetica

What does writing poetry have in common with walking in the city? In translating poetry, what lost paths, dark alleys and chance connections are encountered? How do these change the maps by which cities are known and by which new poetries may be discovered?

In Reality: Selected Poems by Jean Portante, trans. Zoë Skoulding

'In reality, reality is ghosted by a multiplicity of forms of energy & energies of form it is the poet’s job to reveal & hide in the double play of his languages’ hide & seek. Jean Portante is a master at just that chassé-croisé of language & meaning, of real ghosts & ghostly realities. One "In Reality" can (& does) hide another. Read on & in.' – Pierre Joris

Jerome Rothenberg Pologne/1931

Traduction par Jean Portante et Zoë Skoulding

Jean Portante, What does and what doesn’t come to pass (Redfox, 2010), translation from the French, artist’s book.

Marjan Strojan, Barbara Pogacnik, Gregor Podlogar, Ana Pepelnik, In Unfriendly Weather: Four Slovenian Poets, ed. Gregor Podlogar (Ljubljana: Lud Literatura, 2011), joint translator.

Three poems by Samira Negrouche, translation from French, Poetry Wales, Vol 50, Number 3, 2015.

Three poems by Luis David Palacios, translation from Spanish, Poetry Wales, Vol 53, Number 2, 2017.

Poetry extract by Samira Negrouche, translation from French https://actionbooks.org/2020/04/poetry-in-action-samira-negrouche-translated-by-zoe-skoulding/ Poetry in Action 1, April 2020.

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sounds

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/zoeskoulding

rAdda Project performances, Bangor and Paris 2016: http://www.bangoradda.org/events.php.en

Zoë Skoulding with Alan Holmes: Footnotes to Water: Sounding Hidden Rivers – programme for Montez Radio Press in association with Oriel Mostyn, 30th August 2020 https://soundcloud.com/zoeskoulding/footnotes-to-water

The Rooms – solo voice/electronics performance featured on CD with Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America & the UK, ed. Emily Critchley (Reality Street Editions, 2015). https://soundcloud.com/zoeskoulding/zoe-skoulding-from-the-rooms

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events

April 26^th Zoë Skoulding at DOC(K)S / Language is à Virus, https://lespianos.fr/ Paris

May 4^th 2.30 Infradrizzle, Curiad Pulse, The Lord Nelson, Bangor

May 12^th Zoë Skoulding at Xing the Line, Hoxton Cabin, London

May 22^nd-26^th Zoë Skoulding at Los Confines, Honduras

June 8^th Zoë Skoulding at World Oceans Day, Pontio, Bangor

June 22^nd-23^rd Infradrizzle at Midsummer Specials, Schiphorst https://www.midsummer-specials.com/

contact