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Zoë Skoulding

Zoë Skoulding

Biography

Zoë Skoulding has lived in north Wales since 1991, and is AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at Bangor University (2007-2012), researching poetry and city space. She also co-ordinates the university's part-time courses in literature and creative writing. Having launched the literary magazine Skald in 1994 (subsequently co-edited with Ian Davidson) she took up editorship of Poetry Wales in 2008. She is a member of the psychosonic-geography ensemble Parking Non-Stop, whose debut album Species Corridor was released in 2008.

website: www.zoeskoulding.co.uk

Recordings

2008: TRIP festival, Manchester / Nødutgang festival, Bodø, Norway

'Remains of a Future City' was recorded live at the TRIP festival, Manchester on 21st June 2008 and at the Nødutgang festival, Bodø, Norway on 12 June 2008 and features field recordings and sound manipulation by Parking Non-Stop (Alan Holmes, Dewi Evans & Zoë Skoulding) with guests Ronny Wærnes and Lasse Jensen.

Menai Bridge, 2008

'Columns', 'From Mont Royal' and 'Undergrowth' were recorded at home in Menai Bridge on 26th July 2008.

Video

Bibliography

Poetry collections

  • Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008)
  • Dark Wires [with Ian Davidson] (West House Books, 2007)
  • The Mirror Trade (Seren, 2004)
  • Tide Table (Gwasg Pantycelyn, 1998)

Audio releases

  • Species Corridor [with Parking Non-Stop] (Klangbad, 2008)
  • Faust in Autumn [with Faust] (Dirter, 2007)
  • You Have Just Been Poisoned... [with The Serpents] (Ochre, 1999)
  • No Mask, No Cloak, Dim Gobaith [with The Serpents] (Ochre, 1998)

Sample Text

The old walls

The wall is who we are and they are not and
        farther in the boundaries collapse in a rush of
        security as cells multiply and break through stone
translucent grit cracks the skin open to the elements
        we go down through layers and this is history
        a low door at the foot of the walls opens into starry
arches articulate as loin bones the slender joints
        lithe as a voice disappearing from behind the
        words behind the walls where water moves 
against deep tones of trees that cloud the air
        behind the smell of wet earth the voice leaves
        the shape of itself and the footprints of walkers
trace the shell of the city its dead words
        we crawled out of our words tender like snails
        and the new city grows from the loins of the old
as lichen spreads in acid maps invading and
        retreating the city runs along fingers runs along
        roads and wires and into fields and the sightlines
run back to the city in wires and the walls
        keep nothing out and the nothing beyond as a cloud
        of eyes moves through the streets and falls like rain

From Remains of a Future City

Reviews

On The Mirror Trade: "Many of these poems show a good eye for landscape, and an inclination towards imagery that delivers rather than being mere decoration." -- Tony Frazer in Shearsman

"From The Mirror Trade’s first pages, an intelligent and assured observer emerges from the poetry’s meticulous attention to the larger world,  its processes and histories...” -- Carrie Etter in New Welsh Review

On 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

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