'Invisible Sun' (Smokestack, 2021)

Image: Martin O'Neill

Following Viktor Shklovsky’s instruction to make everyday objects seem unfamiliar, Richard Skinner’s fourth collection sets out to release ‘the potential of inanimate objects’. A marbled egg, white balloons, unopened boxes, a Greek island, numbers, a yellow yo-yo—nothing in this book is quite what it seems. Unsettling, precise and enigmatic, Invisible Sun confirms Skinner’s reputation as a poet of playful misplacement and misdirection. It is a book about windows, light, clouds, the ‘upside down world’ glimpsed through shadows and mists, and always the invisible sun—bright source of all life but also our daily measure of time and loss—illuminating ‘the distant glitter of other people’s lives’.

'As with Skinner's other collections, turning these pages is an adventure. He displays the ability to push to the parameters of the recognisable, to make emotional depth out of the fragmented. Breathtaking.' Roy Marshall

'These poems are heartbreaking and eerie and beautiful.' Dan O'Brien

'Absolutely meticulous in their craft and powerfully moving in their effect. Wow.' Lisa Kelly

Published February 2021