The Museum of Disappearing Sounds

The Museum of Disappearing Sounds

In this new collection established poet Zoë Skoulding leads her readers unerringly through a journey along mysterious paths, where the familiar suddenly becomes uncertain, and heavy with potential or unexpected meaning. The past seeps in to the present, as everyday objects retain the imprinted memories of their earlier lives, but at the same time whole areas of sense and lived experience seem to fade and disappear. To Baudelairean correspondences of sound and colour the modern computerised world adds new layers of slippage and overlap in the intangibility and new ambiguities of virtual existence. The disjunctions between digital and real life are subtly paralleled in phrases left suspended and open-ended, questioning whether endings still exist or are simply interruptions in a sequence, to be resumed later. Words and images, objects and experiences dissolve into each other, changing and re-forming in the flow, as unpredictable as a voyage in Rimbaud’s drunken boat. Lost and forgotten voices are rediscovered in abandoned places as borders and boundaries of life and language are pushed apart, only to coalesce into new, still-shifting patterns. Individual words take on a new intensity as language itself becomes uncertain in these haunting, mysterious and deeply moving poems.

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Reviews

'A profound orphic jorney - one which asks you to travel through the traffic, to listen and look again.'

Carol Watts