A Marginal Sea

Zoë Skoulding

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781800172517
• eBook ISBN:
  9781800172524
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

A Marginal Sea is written from the vantage point of Ynys Môn/Anglesey, which is both on the edge of Wales and in a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean—the island is imagined here as a site of archipelagic connection with other places and histories, where the spaces of dream and digital technology are interwoven with the everyday. Skoulding's poems take their readers into new worlds: we come to terms with the oystercatcher's 'muscle of belonging'; we chart the cross-cultural coordinates of 'Newborough Warren with Map of Havana' ('and it's this way to the Malecón /to look out over the Menai Strait'); elegy and song overlap in moving poems which think through how we remember and misremember: 'it's my voice // deepening with others that won't let themselves / be buried' ('Anecdote for the Birds'). A Marginal Sea is inventive, exhilarating in its soundscapes, and brilliantly awake to otherness, in language, and in the animal and natural world.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Weather This
• The Celestial Set-up
• A Rose for Rosa
• A Maritime Vocabulary
• Stellar Bearing Pro Forma
• Newborough Warren with Map of Havana
• The Island
• A Strait Story
• A short Presentation on the Current Direction of Travel
• Displacement Fixing By Steerage
• A Divinatory Calendar
• If Anyone Asks
• Anecdote for the Birds
• Red Squirrels in Coed Cyrnol
• Voyage
• Caller ID
• New Memory
• Is Temporarily Unable
• Migration
• The Bed
• One Stop
• From Tortuguero
• Telescope
• Adar Môn Birds of Anglesey
• Gullscape
• Celeste Stop
• Créteil
• During the Works
• Hello Moon
• Marginalia
• Notes and Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright