Friday Poem – Metamorphic

This week’s poem is from Zoë Skoulding’s 2013 collection, The Museum of Disappearing Sounds.

The disappearing sounds of Zoë Skoulding’s collection may be either in the rich sonic environments that the poems observe, or in the resonance of words themselves, which exist in traces of speech and breath.

‘The Man in the Moone’ takes its title from a 17th century work of science fiction in which lunar inhabitants can communicate their thoughts via music alone. But rather than aspiring to reach beyond language, these poems focus on the spaces that words occupy, looking at how ‘a sentence reverses itself between two pairs of eyes’ or noting ‘the distance drifted by a word shaken loose from border controls’.

Skoulding’s characteristically inventive approach to form emerges in a fractured sonnet sequence based on the coincidences of room numbers. Repeated actions build haunting interior spaces which the reader is invited to…