Do I Look Like an Atmosphere?
Published on 26. February 2026
72 pages
978-1-80017-539-6 (ISBN)
Description
Taking its title from a line in Hotel du Nord, a 1938 film of doomed romance, Do I Look Like an Atmosphere? brings background into the foreground, and asks us to pay close attention to that which we inhabit and change. In these poems the atmosphere is under our skin and in our bones.
Reviewing Skoulding's previous collection, Joey Connolly observed that her work is 'clever, but it is also pleasurable as poetry, and its theory arises from within.' Here again, Skoulding's ingenious, innovative forms evoke a natural world newly vulnerable to human actions. Faced with the inseparability of the non-human world from the destructiveness of human activity, these poems trace their connection across times and places: the humble mussel connects the coast of north Wales with fishing communities world-wide, while the calcium of its shell is found in the limestone of the Norman castles that colonised Wales.
Reviewing Skoulding's previous collection, Joey Connolly observed that her work is 'clever, but it is also pleasurable as poetry, and its theory arises from within.' Here again, Skoulding's ingenious, innovative forms evoke a natural world newly vulnerable to human actions. Faced with the inseparability of the non-human world from the destructiveness of human activity, these poems trace their connection across times and places: the humble mussel connects the coast of north Wales with fishing communities world-wide, while the calcium of its shell is found in the limestone of the Norman castles that colonised Wales.
Reviews / Votes
'Zoe Skoulding's new poems inhabit places of acute attention and listening on an earth whose nature is changing, and human nature along with it. Here speak is listen too, is hear; the land and waters we cross with the poet urge us not to serendipity but to a place of thinking, all of us "knots in time... translating light" in "the university of trees".'Erin Moure 'Skoulding's songs unfold the curriculum of our polycrisis and the noise of our dreams... The music is insurgent and hits the fibre of our being with vibratory impact - Skoulding knows how to pitch to the spot where the echo comes back.'
Jonathan Skinner 'Skoulding has a great music and internal spirit in her work.'
Harry Speirs, The Indiependent
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
File size
1,10 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-80017-539-6 (9781800175396)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Zoe Skoulding
Do I Look Like an Atmosphere?
Book
approx. 02/2026
Carcanet Poetry
€16.50
Not yet published
Person
Zoe Skoulding's six previous collections of poems include A Marginal Sea (Carcanet, 2022), shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year, following most recently by A Revolutionary Calendar (Shearsman, 2020) and Footnotes to Water (Seren, 2019), which won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award. She is co-editor, with Katherine M. Hedeen, of Poetry's Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations (Shearsman, 2022), and her critical publications have explored poetry's relationships with place, listening, translation and ecology. She is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University, and lives on Ynys Mon / Anglesey.
