Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
Footnotes to Water
Footnotes to Water
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Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description
Yn Footnotes to Water , mae'r bardd Zoë Skoulding yn dilyn dwy afon anghofiedig: afon Adda ym Mangor ac afon Bièvre ym Mharis ac yn olrhain olion llenyddol carnau defaid drwy fynyddoedd Cymru. Mae'r bardd yn dadlennu bod ardaloedd trefol a gwledig yn fannau o gydberthynas bywiog, ac mae'n archwilio'r ffyrdd y mae lleoedd yn gosod ffurf ar iaith ac yn cael eu siapio gan iaith.
Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description
In Footnotes to Water , poet Zoë Skoulding follows two forgotten rivers, the Adda in Bangor and the Bièvre in Paris, and tracks the literary hoofprints of sheep through Welsh mountains. In these journeys she reveals urban and rural locales as sites of lively interconnection, exploring the ways in which place shapes and is shaped by language.
Manylion y cynnyrch / Product details
- ISBN 13
- 9781781725269
- Gwales Code
- gwales.com.9781781725269
- Gwerthwr / Vendor
- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
- Long Title
- Footnotes to Water
- Awdur / Author
- Skoulding, Zoë
- Current Price ex VAT
- £9.99
- Current Price inc VAT
- £9.99
- Availability Status (EN)
- Non-Stock Item - Ordered on request
- Availability Status (CY)
- Archebir yn ôl y galw
- Dyddiad cyhoeddi / Publication Date
- 2019-11-15
- Cyhoeddwr / Publisher
- Seren
- Media Type (EN)
- Paperback / softback
- Media Type (CY)
- Clawr meddal
- Pages
- 68 pages
- Size
- 210 × 135 mm
- Language Code
- English
- Categori / Category
- CY: Barddoniaeth (yn Saesneg) | EN: Poetry (in English)
- Is-gategori / Subcategory
- CY: Beirdd Unigol (yn Saesneg) | EN: Individual Poets (in English)
Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography
Zoë Skoulding is primarily a poet, although her work encompasses sound-based vocal performance, collaboration, translation, literary criticism, editing, and teaching creative writing. She is Reader in the School of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at Bangor University. She is the author of a number of poetry collections, including The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (Seren) which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and Remains of a Future City , (Seren) which was long-listed for Wales Book of the Year.
Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review
This is the latest of Zoë Skoulding’s collections of poetry and the result of three projects with other artists, skilfully linked into a satisfying whole. ‘Adda’ and ‘Teint’ are both written around rivers which have become hidden under urban environments. ‘Heft’ is a short group on a more rural theme of habitat and cynefin – the localised and passed-on knowledge of both people and sheep. The poet is a Reader at Bangor University and ‘Adda’ was part of a project based around a specific area of Bangor, involving photography (by Ben Stammers) and memories collected from local people on shared walks. A performance of the poems and photographs was accompanied by a soundscape made by Skoulding’s husband, Alan Holmes. The Afon Adda was also known as Afon Cachu (shit river) and the sense of pollution is common to both groups of poems. The first seven poems capture both the damage the town has done to the stream and the threat that water is seen to be. The language is constantly shifting – playfully and dangerously. The Adda (Welsh for Adam) is ‘an adder stamped underground’, ‘subtracted from its/own presence.’ The lost voice of the river ‘that doesn’t even know/how to speak its own language’ speaks of cultural loss. The subsequent poems chime with this loss, not just of language but of function, not only of the river but of the people. ‘There is Chinese/polyester … where the purple/loosestrife was.’ In the witty ‘Gull Song’, the gulls ‘came in with the herring and stayed … gathering your waste in our plastic beaks.’ ‘We are leftovers too’, denatured as the river is by messy, urban life. There follows prose and a selection of words from local people, ending with ‘Maeyc’s Pond’, in which the speaker remembers his experience of a tiny remnant of natural water-life. The river valley, remade by glacial action, then by ‘flow of capital’, is an underlying metaphor in the collection. It is caught in the Welsh phrase, ‘I’r pant y rhed y dŵr’ (implying the rich get richer) and in the bitter conclusion of Poem 7: ‘Spent-out water running through/Where trickle-down never did’. ‘Teint’ is a title that perfectly captures the themes of the third section – tainting, colouring and dyeing/dying of the lost river of Paris. This twenty-poem sequence is more unified, with each split seven-line poem beginning with a negative – ‘Not a river but its shadow’. The offset split lines on the page give a sense of things slipping past one another. The epigraph from Huysmans describes the Bièvre as a perfect symbol of feminine misery exploited by a large city. The hidden river passes through tanneries where ‘industrial blood’ is dumped upstream of the clean skins, as the mess of war is hidden or forgotten; she becomes a worker, driving mills or taking away sewage, now becoming poetic only when ‘safely dead’. Poem 6 refers to Bièvre as meaning beaver and the poet plays with the beast-bite of ‘water/mordant’ passing through the dye-house. The stain of scarlet (like Lady Macbeth’s hands) will never be clean. That dramatic reference is used again in Poem 8, which draws many threads together. In 9 the stuttering rhythm echoes the broken stream. In 12 the river is a gut, a hell (echoing Faustus), but ironically recalling a romantic song. ‘Teint’ was translated into French by Jean Portante, and the recording of the two poets’ performance (at bangoradda.org) is a wonderful presentation of the complete work. This collection shows the poet as a mature and immensely skilful artist at the top of her game.
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