Zoë Skoulding shortlisted for Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry

Zoë Skoulding shortlisted for Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry

10 March 2014

"The disappearing sounds of Zoë Skoulding’s new collection may be either in the rich sonic environments that the poems observe, or in the resonance of words themselves, which exist in traces of speech and breath. Skoulding’s characteristically inventive approach to form emerges in a fractured sonnet sequence based on the coincidences of room numbers.

Repeated actions build haunting interior spaces which the reader is invited to enter, each poem becoming a room in which sound ‘bounces off four walls’, as memory accumulates in the subtle rhythms of everyday life. These poems can provoke states of eerie unease, or of passion evoked with shimmering densities of verbal texture. Exploratory and alive to the senses, The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (Seren, 2013) creates new perspectives on language and the world in which it exists." The Poetry Society

The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry

The £5,000 prize is donated by Carol Ann Duffy, funded from the annual honorarium the Poet Laureate traditionally receives from HM The Queen. The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry seeks to recognise excellence in poetry, highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets to our cultural life.

“In order to thrive, poetry must always be open to the world it inhabits. This means that it’s vital for poets to engage with other art forms. A poet can learn as much about their craft from closely examining the work of other artists as they can from poetry itself.” Sarah Maguire, judge of The Ted Hughes Award 2011.

The Museum of Disappearing Sounds from the judges

"These are poems of disappearing sounds, of the fugitive and durable energy of sound itself, and the richness of the sonic environment; poems in which words and sounds and voices and traces of speech are re-discovered; rooms in which ‘a pattern unfolding’ gathers energy from the half-life of sounds into a reconstruction of song; both a collection of poems and a museum of collections." Sean Borodale

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