Zoë Skoulding

Zoë Skoulding Poems

Zoë Skoulding Biography

Zoë Skoulding (born in Bradford, 1967) has lived in north Wales since 1991. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (Seren, 2013), while Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008) was long-listed for Wales Book of the Year 2009. She also translates poetry, writes literary criticism, and was the editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales 2008-2014. She is Senior Lecturer at Bangor University.)

The Best Poem Of Zoë Skoulding

Building Site

Between the buildings
trees reach down
to languages
of soil and worms,
leaves gloss argots of glass and steel;
woods lie down on floors
to bounce back
every word, every word
you speak
with the long
echo of your footsteps down into the mud.

In simultaneous decay and growth
this maze of streets and squares
puts down its roots,
unsettling the ground
with every new inflection, every
demolition: first the trees, then the wooden
houses, bricks, the broken concrete.
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.

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