Zoe Skoulding

Remains of a Future City by Zoë Skoulding, 64pp, £7.99. Seren Books. http://www.seren-books.com/

Immediately I was attracted by the title of this book, with its play on time past, present and future, and with its promise of exploration of the ‘city'. Having seen a fair bit of Zoë Skoulding's work in various magazines, I was sure she would not disappoint. And indeed she doesn't. Every poem in the book is scattered with breathtaking and haunting gems, for example:

balancing the
small loss of your face left
behind
the city's weight

(from ‘Docks', p. 41).

Or: ‘give me your ears / your eyes give me your mouth / daily on street corners' (from ‘Columns', pp. 46-47).

Each poem is beautifully and painstakingly crafted. Yet there is never an impression of ‘work'. Rather, as readers, we are invited to take part and delight in what Nietzsche would have called ‘divine play'. There are many different kinds of poem, from the intensely lyrical to a radical use of collage. In this way she allows herself to navigate what we might think of as the more objective aspects of the city and at the same time to delve into her own very personal response to it. There are poems which take the form of regular stanzas, and there are poems shaped like towers or scaffolding, or even an aeroplane. As Skoulding enters the city in its different forms and dimensions, so the city enters her. Indeed, at times there is no division between the two. Images of the human body and its muscles and bones become indistinguishable from images of girders, bricks and pipes. In this way both the strengths and the vulnerability of the city are emphasised:

Look,
         now you can see in the ruins how
                                    buildings took hold and pushed up
         through your bones, rubble, walls of earth,
                                                            this tangle of useless pipes.

(from ‘Building Site', p. 10).

And we, as inhabitants of the city, share its vulnerabilities:

at any given point
we could be somewhere

                                   as fractures run through stone
                                                the houses shift
                                    the air conditional

(from ‘Square of the Appalling Mobile', p. 33).

The dreamlike, the fable-like are inseparable from what we normally think of as the real, forcing us as readers to question our own perceptions. Like Calvino in his Invisible Cities, Skoulding convinces us through the detail of her images. And as with Calvino, we are always wondering where she is going to take us next. There are multiple levels of meaning and association, yet she remains readable and lyrical even in more complex moments:

face the edge of your body             where is it becoming
            streaked on the page           your face crumpled
the street crossed by another        salt sleet in eyes      turn
left                        stumble into brambles                  cross
you can't miss it                            walk in out of the wind

(from ‘Llanddwyn Beach with Directions for Copehagen', p. 51)

Like a cinema reel, events and meetings flash by. For example, someone in a house falls in love, and as with everything else ‘reality' and dream are mixed:

Extravagant fables gather in doorways
          circulate like draughts with no reference

                        to the real
                                     which disappears
         under the carpet

                                               when your voice at breaking point
                                                            rolls over a mouthful of bricks

to fill these crumbling arches that have
                                                             opened up all over you

and you should go home now but you never can

(from ‘The House Where It Is Impossible Not to Fall in Love', p. 25).

There is also a religious impulse behind the idea of the city. Indeed, the tone is set in the very first poem ‘You Will Live in Your own Cathedral', which invites us to consider the transience of all that we know, and to discover a sense of the miraculous in this very quality: ‘The cathedral of glass is misted over / by the scratch of voices wearing it to sand' (p. 9).

Skoulding is of course working from a poetic tradition that goes back to Baudelaire and beyond, and which has been mined by many over the course of the last century. Yet, she is able to bring her own unique perspective, and somehow marry the circumstantial and local to the archetypal ideas and images we all share. She has an enviable ability to capture and hold still the city's beautiful intangibles without in any way destroying a sense of movement and freedom. Remains of a Future City is, as you will have gathered by now, highly recommended. Get hold of a copy.