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

These vibrant, multi-layered poems create a textual city of monuments, castles, bridges and labyrinths through which the reader is invited to wander. Such visions carry within them both hints of utopia and the seeds of disaster, as the future city is haunted by its ruins. New relationships emerge from the fractures of a shared past and the global communications of the twenty-first century. The historic traumas of European cityscapes emerge in dream and nightmare, but also in the process of rebuilding ''as the vein runs / under fragile reconstructions / of what was holding us together''. As well as testing the notion of the city as a collective identity, these poems present the urban landscape as open to what lies beyond it.

"Her observations have the painful precision of the hyper vigilant."
Planet

"Beyond the initial appearance of austerity of design lies a city of the mind that, in its openness to play and exploration, is moving, even beautiful… In work like this, Skoulding is bringing fresh ways of thinking, and of making poems, to Britain." Poetry London

Zoë Skoulding has lived in north Wales since 1991. She is Research Fellow in the School of English at Bangor University, exploring relationships between poetry and city space, and co-ordinates the University''s part-time courses in literature and creative writing. She has been involved in various cross-artform projects and is a member of the group Parking Non-Stop. Having launched the literary magazine Skald in 1994, she became Editor of Poetry Wales in 2008.