Seas, Margins, Dreams: Eilish Martin, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez & Zoë Skoulding

With a formal dexterity, and a willingness to experiment, three acclaimed poets will chart our species’ “current direction of travel” within troubled biological territories.

Merging nuanced soundscapes and a haiku-like density, their poetry sings of environmental concern and the hope for attention’s transformative acts; witnessing, and radical hearing.

Eilish Martin is a poet whose publications include slitting the tongues of jackdaws and Ups Bounce Dash (Summer Palace Press). Her work appears in the foundational anthologies The White Page (Salmon, 2001) and Word of Mouth (Blackstaff, 1996). As translator she has contributed to When the Neva rushes backwards, a Russian-English parallel text anthology featuring the work of five St. Petersburg women poets (Lagan Press) and also to Seán Ó Ríordáin: Selected Poems, edited by Frank Sewell and published by Yale University Press.

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over seventy collections of his poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards in the Spanish-speaking region, including, in 2015, the coveted Loewe Prize and most recently the Manuel Alcántara Prize. His selected poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese and he has read his poetry in more than fifty countries. In the last decade, his work has developed an enthusiastic readership in the US and the UK, where he has published seven book-length translations, the latest being rebel matter: poems 2000-2021(Shearsman). He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is currently Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba. 

Zoë Skoulding is a poet whose latest collection is A Marginal Sea (Carcanet, 2022). She is the editor, with Katherine M. Hedeen, of Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations (Shearsman, 2022). She is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University and lives on Ynys Môn.