French Connections: Zoe Skoulding's European cities

Although born in Bradford and raised in East Anglia, Zoë Skoulding can be considered a ‘Welsh European’, to adapt Raymond Williams’s phrase. She regards her adopted homeplace, Bangor, as a European city, and her poetry is frequently preoccupied with the connections – both material and imaginative – between places, especially where urban and non-urban spaces, the local and the global, are mutually entangled. This chapter will examine in detail her representations of European cityscapes, particularly as mediated by engagements with French or Francophone writers and thinkers, from the Situationist International to Michel de Certeau, Charles Baudelaire to Guillaume Apollinaire. Beginning with an account of Skoulding’s debts to, and deviations from, the Situationists in The Mirror Trade (2004) and Remains of a Future City (2008), we trace the growing significance of Paris and Parisian avant-gardes in Skoulding’s more recent work, including The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (2013), Footnotes to Water (2019), and A Revolutionary Calendar (2020). However, Skoulding’s restless, shape-shifting cityscapes, in which walking is a key spatial practice, are persistently informed by her location in and ambivalent identification with her home ground in North Wales. Consequently, in her poetry Bangor figures both as a place on the margins of post-Brexit Britain and a central node in the wider network that is European culture.