‘Zoë Skoulding’s new poems inhabit places of acute attention and listening on an earth whose nature is changing, and human nature along with it. - Erìn Moure.

Taking its title from a line in Hôtel 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, and 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.

The volume works by acoustic map and data flow, threading song through scientific and literary reference; the effect is less argument than attention, recalibrated. Skoulding’s six previous collections have already found readers well outside Wales, and this is poetry that translates — its subject is the physical world we hold in common.