Footnotes to Water
Footnotes to Water
With Footnotes to Water, winner of the much deserved Wales Book of the Year Award 2020 for poetry, Zoë Skoulding confirms her place as a leading poet who continues to examine her surroundings, the imprints of human history on nature and the ways in which nature is present in man-built environment. Here, she imagines a river as a transverse section, cutting through urban and rural spaces, connecting places that are themselves in flux. She follows the mysterious path of the culverted Afon Adda in Bangor, close to where she lives, as it draws her into conversations with the city as well as with the sound of the river itself, half-heard under the metal plates of the observation chambers along its route. It leads her to the Bièvre, a lost Parisian stream that once ran through streets of tanneries and past the Gobelins tapestry factory, where the quality of a famous red dye was attributed to the river’s polluted water. Following literary traces as well as exploring landscapes, a sequence on hefting sheep links the two rivers, extending the idea of local habitat or cynefin in Welsh to encompass the interweaving lives of different cultures and species.
Being also a translator and editor, Skoulding is apt at crossing cultural and linguistic boundaries, adapting diverse poetic forms to her needs and bringing the threads connecting her observations of two very different locations together, as she traces the hidden manifestations of nature in a cityscape and examines nature from a perspective informed by contemplation of human enterprise and science, and ultimately interprets both as sites of cultural heritage in the broadest sense.
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Seren (2019)
76pp.
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Seren (2019)
Mick Felton
Seren
4 Derwen Road,
Bridgend,
CF31 1LHmickfelton@serenbooks.com
www.serenbooks.com
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