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Featured Poet: Zoë Skoulding



Eyewear is very pleased to welcome poet Zoë Skoulding (pictured) this sunny London morning (after a day of thundershowers).  Skoulding’s most recent collection is Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008), following The Mirror Trade in 2004. Dark Wires, a collaboration with Ian Davidson, was published by West House Books in 2007. She is a member of the group Parking Non-Stop, whose album Species Corridor was released in 2008, and also performs her poetry in various cross-artform contexts. She is one of the best experimental poets writing in the UK today.  She is the Editor of Poetry Wales.  As a poet born in Montreal, I can't help but be pleased by the subject matter of the poem below!


From Mont Royal

They call the surface of the landscape a skin (the hugeness of that organ).
But it is a lung. 25 times the surface of the skin, 500 million passageways
into the blood. 
                                                                                    Erín Moure


Take a walk down
a deep breath where

fractal branches crumple air
ways divide and multiply

in street plan sections
deep in the creases

of lungs an interior
surface like raised hands

with eyes looks back
at wet air exhaled

in clouds as gas
exchange latticed under fog

or honeycombed in lights
in steps of respiration

I follow my nose
down pharynx larynx windpipe

bronchi bronchioles and into
the tips of terminal

branches further in and
farther out it’s winter

and it should be
snowing but it’s too

warm for a coat
a line I dreamed

escapes me slides between
inverted streets that suck

in cash expel it
through glittering halls or

was that maws or
malls the underground unfolds

at each step in
blood transport as doors

open to respiratory trees
starred with blue lights

through darkness a face
travels as time grows

out of itself and
antique domes jut against

sheer glass or brick
scuffed where painted ads

peel off and underfoot
the sandy mud exposes

pipes and drains with
planks laid over while

mist presses down on
arched ribs of trees

and oxygen crosses alveoli

poem by Zoe Skoulding.  Published online with permission of the author.
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Comments

Poetry Pleases! said…
Dear Todd

Interesting poem. Although she's the editor of Poetry Wales and therefore presumably a friend of Amy Wack's, I don't actually know anything else about her.

Best wsihes from Simon
Fri May 27, 10:29:00 am 2011
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