: zoe skoulding :

zoëskoulding's third collection, Remains of a Future City, will be published by Seren in 2008. She currently holds an AHRC fellowship at Bangor University, north Wales, where she is undertaking practice-based research in contemporary poetry and urban space. She founded the literary magazine Skald in 1994 and co-edits it with Ian Davidson, with whom she has also written a book of collaborative poetry, Dark Wires (West House Books, 2007). From 2008 she will be taking up editorship of Poetry Wales. Her cross-artform collaborations include Parking Non-Stop, a recording and performance project combining poetry with music and experimental soundscape.


zoëskoulding
Astrolaire I walked in the garden under planets and streetlights between streetlight and flower strung between elements between the streets converging a rose does not know it is a rose the city does not know it is a rose the city opened I unfolded myself through lines of symmetry the hidden asterion star flower punctured the dark life of its root skeins stretched over sky as satellites bloomed around the world The Gothic-Romantic Quarter Nights when it’s dark enough for stars the sky unpolluted we come here with our worn-out stares tiny on the banks of the river wanting to speak in spires and towers to hear the rattle of uneven tiles against our teeth the buried kings and queens their stone mouths suspended stare warnings in narrow streets clusters of leaning roofs in crevices the shadows piling up at each step’s echo while architecture presses in like thunder the ink-sheen of the sky held up by every arch clawing higher to another arch we climb stairs of worn stone The Historic Quarter in the green-papered chamber of memory even the dirt is historical museum faces swim round this aquarium over and above the artefacts the past looks back at you they fired at clocks to stop the day its face spun out in webs of solar flare cycles of hands coming round again the same day ticks closer between then and now you cross the line of fire write over battles in relief the truth in sediments * first published in New Welsh Review
zoëskoulding's third collection, Remains of a Future City, will be published by Seren in 2008. She currently holds an AHRC fellowship at Bangor University, north Wales, where she is undertaking practice-based research in contemporary poetry and urban space. She founded the literary magazine Skald in 1994 and co-edits it with Ian Davidson, with whom she has also written a book of collaborative poetry, Dark Wires (West House Books, 2007). From 2008 she will be taking up editorship of Poetry Wales. Her cross-artform collaborations include Parking Non-Stop, a recording and performance project combining poetry with music and experimental soundscape.