Do I Look Like an Atmosphere?

Skoulding's second Carcanet collection develops the author's contribution to ecopoetics, inventing new forms to think through relationships with the more-than-human world. Through ferns, plastic, troubadour birdsong and broken bones, experimental poems bring background into the foreground.

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.