'These are mesmerising and unsettling poems. In an unstable world, objects speak a language of constant change. There's a split-second balance; for now the slates hold. The language is, as it needs to be, spare, tough, elegant. Zoë Skoulding brings cool and penetrating insights to disrupt quotidian vision.' Wendy Mulford

These vibrant, multi-layered poems create a textual city of monuments, castles, bridges and labyrinths through which the reader is invited to wander. Such visions carry within them both hints of utopia and the seeds of disaster, as the future city is haunted by its ruins.

New relationships emerge from the fractures of a shared past and the global communications of the twenty-first century. The historic traumas of European cityscapes emerge in dream and nightmare, but also in the process of rebuilding 'as the vein runs / under fragile reconstructions / of what was holding us together'. As well as testing the notion of the city as a collective identity, these poems present the urban landscape as open to what lies beyond it.
 

Listen to Zoë Skoulding read her poem, ‘Forest with A to Z of Cardiff’: