Do I Look Like an Atmosphere? - Paperback

by Zoë Skoulding (Author)

Taking its title from a line in Hô tel 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 evoke a 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.

Author Biography

Zoë Skoulding's six previous collections of poems include A Marginal Sea (2022), shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year, following A Revolutionary Calendar (2020) and Footnotes to Water (2019), which won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award. In 2018 she received the Cholmondeley Award for her body of work in poetry. She is co-editor, with Katherine M. Hedeen, of Poetry's Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations (2022). She is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University, and lives on Ynys Mô n/Anglesey.