Shortlisted for the Wales Poetry Book of the Year Award 2023. A Marginal Sea is written from the vantage point of Ynys Mon/Anglesey, which is both on the edge of Wales and in a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean - the island is imagined here as a site of archipelagic connection with other places and histories, where the spaces of dream and digital technology are interwoven with the everyday. Skoulding's poems take their readers into new worlds: we come to terms with the oystercatcher's 'muscle of belonging'; we chart the cross-cultural coordinates of 'Newborough Warren with Map of Havana' ('and it's this way to the Malecon /to look out over the Menai Strait'); elegy and song overlap in moving poems which think through how we remember and misremember: 'it's my voice // deepening with others that won't let themselves / be buried.' ('Anecdote for the Birds'). A Marginal Sea is inventive, exhilarating in its soundscapes, and brilliantly awake to otherness, in language, and in the animal and natural world.

About the Author
Zoe Skoulding is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University. Her collections of poetry (published by Seren Books) include The Mirror Trade (2004); Remains of a Future City (2008), shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year; The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (2013), shortlisted for Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry; and Footnotes to Water (2019), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2020. In 2020 she also published The Celestial Set-Up (Oystercatcher) and A Revolutionary Calendar (Shearsman). Her critical work includes two monographs, Contemporary Women's Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric (Liverpool University Press, 2020). She received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2018 for her body of work in poetry, and is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Reviews
'Zoe Skoulding's magisterial new book A Marginal Sea offers us a pentathlon of innovative forms in which we find expressionist typography, haibun, calendrical prognostications, a poignant soliloquy by the bird-haunted Odysseus, and striking passages of sheer lyric beauty. This is a book that makes you feel, as it lengthens your wingspan, glad to be alive.' - Forrest Gander


Awards
Short-listed for The Wales Poetry Book of the Year Award 2023.



Book Information
ISBN 9781800172517
Author Zoe Skoulding
Format Paperback
Page Count 84
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd