Please join us to celebrate the launch of A Marginal Sea by Zoë Skoulding. Hosting the reading will be poet Harriet Tarlo. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Register and let us know you can make it by joining the Facebook event.

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’).

Zoë Skoulding is already an established presence in UK poetry, awarded a Cholmondeley Award in 2018 and the 2020 winner of the Wales Poetry Book of the Year Award. Her work has been translated into many languages and her new book, and Carcanet debut, presents wonderfully alert poems, attentive to the world around us and to how we impact upon it: ‘when does holding out your hand / become a question’, asks the speaker of ‘The Celestial Set-Up’. A Marginal Sea is inventive, exhilarating in its soundscapes, and brilliantly awake to otherness, in language, and in the animal and natural world.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.

Please note that there is a limited number of places for the reading, so do book early to avoid disappointment. You should receive a confirmation email with details on how to join after you register. If this does not arrive, please contact us to let us know. Please also be aware that clicking ‘attending’ on the Facebook event will not guarantee your place – you must complete the Zoom registration here.

About the speakers:

Zoë Skoulding is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University. Her collections of poetry (published by Seren Books) include The Mirror Trade (2004); Remains of a Future City (2008), shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year; The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (2013), shortlisted for Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry; and Footnotes to Water (2019), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2020. In 2020 she also published The Celestial Set-Up (Oystercatcher) and A Revolutionary Calendar (Shearsman). Her critical work includes two monographs, Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric (Liverpool University Press, 2020). She received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2018 for her body of work in poetry, and is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Harriet Tarlo was born in Worcester in 1968. She studied at the University of Durham for several years, receiving her BA in 1989 and her PhD (on the American poet, H.D.) in 1995. Her academic writing focuses on modernist and contemporary poetry with particular interest in linguistic experimentation, gender and landscape/environment. She now teaches English and Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. She lives with her partner and two children near Holmfirth, having lived in West Yorkshire since the mid-nineties. She spent most of the previous decade in County Durham, and is also a frequent visitor to the North Cornish coast. Her poetry engages as closely as it can with these places, not in an attempt to represent them, but to embody the sound and rhythm of human relationships with the outside.