‘White Noise Machine’ (Salt, 2023)
‘There’s a tremendous kinetic energy in these poems, evidenced in the wide variety of linguistic stratagems he deploys to express the wonder and joy of things. These range from bright-eyed vocalic transpositions to wholesale melding of poems by different authors. It’s all part of the pleasure afforded by this truly remarkable collection.’
— Peter Didsbury, author of A Fire Shared (read the full review here) ‘Imbued with the spirits of Peter Gabriel, Agnes Martin and MacNeice, amongst others, these are poems of formal skill, playfully pressing up against formal and aleatory constraints and re-making themselves anew. White Noise Machine is striking, profound and fresh as the cherry tree that “explodes in white noise every spring”.’ — Sarah Westcott, author of Bloom ‘Richard Skinner’s White Noise Machine is a glorious mix tape of a collection, bold and brilliant in its mash-ups of pop songs and poets as various as Muldoon and Yeats. But what is playful is also meaningful: Skinner is concerned with capturing these fragments of our language and culture, our natural landscape – in other words, the things we risk losing – and giving them back to us beautifully reformed.’ — Tamar Yoseloff ‘Music-fixated writer Richard Skinner creates poems and novels that sound great; harmonies and rhythms lurking in all the cracks and leaking from the edges of the page. His 2014 novel The Velvet Gentleman got inside the mind of eccentric French composer Erik Satie in an exceptionally sensitive way, and that quality of sonic empathy also flows through this fresh collection of poems, White Noise Machine. Poems dedicated to experimental composers Elaine Radigue and Christopher Hobbs unpick their musical tics and vocabulary; other poems retread lines by Kate Bush, David Bowie and Peter Gabriel, finding new pathways through what you thought was familiar. A treat from beginning to end.’ — Philip Clark, Prospect magazine ‘This effortlessly elegant collection explores sound and our responses to sound – temporal, synaesthetic and associative. We hear the call of a lapwing; the harmony and counterpoint in the blending of lines taken from song lyrics; the echo of vowels and consonants under lipogrammatic constraints; the metronomic repetition in a triolet and the cherry tree that “explodes in white noise every spring”. These poems coax us into listening attentively – an under-valued and much-needed attribute in today’s shouty world.’ — Marian Christie ‘So much to love, admire and absorb in Richard Skinner’s latest collection. What is unique and unexpected is the calming quality of these poems. Felt like I'd been on a retreat after finishing... don’t know how for sure that magic happens but it is transcendental.’ — Lisa Kelly ‘A playful yet deeply felt sound/word mashup of our modern gods & the meaning found in culture & nature.’ — JP Seabright ‘Beautifully crafted.’ — Jean Atkin Copies of White Noise Machine are available from Salt here. You can read two poems from White Noise Machine here. You can read an interview about White Noise Machine here. You can listen to me talking about Dream into Play & White Noise Machine here. You can listen to a playlist of songs that inspired White Noise Machine here. |