Review: Remains of a Future City by Zoë Skoulding

Hazel Mutch

 

In Remains of a Future City, Zoë Skoulding explores the relationship of words to the world. Alluding to ideas of social constructionism and discourse, and of psychological constructions and language, she asks herself where words belong in relation to places and spaces.

Together the poems evoke a constantly shifting built landscape, rising and falling in states of construction and deconstruction, and speculate on how language shapes and alters our world. In poems such as 'Building Site', the place is language, revealed in phrases such as "languages / of soil and worms" and "argots of glass and steel", and there are references to Wittgenstein's assertion, 'the limits of my language mean the limits of my world' in lines such as "the wall a sentence / crumbling into air", in 'Underpass'.

If Skoulding is expounding that language makes the world, she puts this into practice in the writing itself through her use of language in making the poems, which exist as language, not just ideas. Words and phrases stand alone as fulfilling in themselves, even before connections are made from which meaning can be derived. They evoke atmospheres, emotions, and images, and relate to the senses in such a way that the poems avoid being abstract or detached. In this way Skoulding manages to convey complexity without alienating the reader.

This intensity of exhilarating language is achieved through the physicality of the poems, which speak of the world, the body and language as one. This idea of the city, or its constructions, not only as language but also as the body is present in many of the poems. In 'Exchange' for example, "the backbone / keeps a connection", and in 'The New Bridge', "the vein runs / under fragile reconstructions", and "blood / runs between us". The sensations this language produces means the act of reading the poems occurs partly in the body, and therefore connects the reader directly to elemental human experience. The idea of the city as the body is explored most explicitly in the poem 'From Mont Royal'.

'Exchange' and 'The New Bridge' are also examples of how the striking physical and visual detail on the surface works on a literal level to some extent. This is another method through which Skoulding gives the poems a tangibility, and therefore identity and vitality, even before any deeper meaning is reached by the reader. In 'Exchange', "the skeleton service operates", comes shortly after "the backbone/ keeps a connection", giving the literal 'skeleton service' a human, bodily quality because of the connection between the two images. In 'The New Bridge', "your heart pumps / in both directions at once" and "we are water and time", work on a literal level but are also evocative on a more intimate emotional plane.

The poems have social, psychological and philosophical subtexts. 'The Building Constructed From Its Own Fall' is a visual, quite literal, description of a demolition in reverse, yet has intimations of deeper significance. Skoulding achieves this through subtle means, firstly in the title through use of the word 'fall' with its biblical and cataclysmic connotations, then in a question, "is this / weight the way it holds us / down?" and a suggestion, "Hard to say whether this is / destruction or creation". The poem also deals with the fluidity of time and our perceptions of it. This is a weighty theme explored throughout the collection (and reflected in its title) and in this poem she ignites it as a concept in the final phrase, "a place that used to be the future".

Skoulding's lightness of touch allows her to give form to complex ideas and obscure concepts in a way which engages the reader but does not limit interpretive possibilities. Subtexts are not so heavily drawn that they becomes the text, nor allusions so veiled that they cannot be picked up by the reader. The poems are alive on their surfaces, drawing the reader in to engage with the language before responding to suggestions that lead beneath the surface.

Skoulding uses conceit very effectively in a number of poems in the collection, for example 'The Key' which describes the chaos and uncertainty outside what we can define in words through images of a woman entering and leaving a building or room and the extended metaphor of the key. Skoulding achieves a constant flow of movement between the symbol and the symbolized, and this is facilitated by the fluid form unhindered by punctuation. Phrases hang and float creating possibilities for alternative connections, and serving also to emphasise the instability of the world Skoulding evokes.

Another poem using extended metaphor is 'Reconstruction', in which memory is examined through the image of a building. Skoulding balances the abstract ("as they did before / the words fell down") with the concrete ("where new bricks / are mortared to the old"), and brings the two together for clarity; ("if you build around a memory / words come first and walls follow"). Again, in this poem, the form reiterated the ideas within it, with each section building on the previous one.

Skoulding utilises stylistic variety to the full, demonstrating how form can intensify the impact of the words. In 'Columns' the layout is like that of a newspaper, suggesting something presented as 'true' or factual, allowing her to say something about text, language and communication. The lack of punctuation eliminates limitations of time, suggesting to the reader an experience of falling into a perpetual situation. Some of the poems, such as 'Castle', are reminiscent of concrete poetry, as their shape on the page echoes the subject matter. Others, such as 'The Baths of Amnesia' are fragmented, with words and phrases isolated, creating additional links and tensions, and leading not just to a richness of possible interpretations, but to meanings that can shift with each reading.

Skoulding cites Chtcheglov's 'Formula for a New City' as an inspiration¹ and has used this work for the titles of some of her poems. Her interest in the Situationists is evident in Skoulding's poems in which her language radically shakes up the environment, and some of the poems have more explicit political undertones, particularly those towards the end of the collection. She utilises various sources to activate her poems, such as playing out some of the Situationists' ideas about Psychogeography, re-experiencing a landscape and putting it into language in poems such as 'Forest With A to Z of Cardiff'.

Remains of a Future City by Zoë Skoulding's presents the reader with questions about how language creates, defines, and limits our perceptions, and demonstrates how the possibilities of poetry can be pushed in order to probe and develop concepts such as these.


Skoulding, Z (2008) Remains of a Future City. Wales: Seren.

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¹ Skoulding, Z (2010) in Etter, C (ed.) Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets. p.108 Exeter: Shearsman Books.