Zoe Skouldings new poems take their readers into new worlds: here, we come to terms with the impossible speech of the cormorant, chart the cross-cultural coordinates of Newborough Warren with Map of Havana (and its this way to the Malecon / to look out over the Menai Strait), and in moving poems which think through how we remember and misremember, elegy and song overlap: its my voice / deepening with others that wont let themselves / be buried. (Anecdote for the Birds). Zoe Skoulding is already an established presence in UK poetry, awarded a Cholmondeley Award in 2018 and the 2020 winner of the Wales Poetry Book of the Year Award. Her work has been translated into 18 languages and her new book, and Carcanet debut, presents wonderfully alert poems, attentive to the world around us and to how we impact upon it: when does holding out your hand / become a question, asks the speaker of The Celestial Set-Up. A Marginal Sea is inventive, exhilarating in its soundscapes, and brilliantly awake to otherness, in language, and in the animal and natural world.
