Name: Footnotes to Water by ZoeSkoulding
Duration: 1 h

Programme for Montez Press Radio in association with Oriel Mostyn
30.08.20 https://www.mostyn.org/montez_30august

Zoë Skoulding with Alan Holmes: Footnotes to Water: Sounding Hidden Rivers
Zoë Skoulding's poetry collection Footnotes to Water, winner of the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2020, imagines a river as a transverse section, cutting through urban and rural spaces, connecting places that are themselves in flux. It traces the mysterious path of the buried Afon Adda in Bangor, North Wales, entering conversations with the city and its past as well as with the sound of the river itself, half-heard under the metal plates of the observation chambers along its route. In an unlikely twinning of two very different cities, this journey leads to Paris and to the Bièvre, a lost Parisian stream that once ran through streets of tanneries and past the Gobelins tapestry factory, where the quality of a famous red dye was attributed to the river’s polluted water. This performance, in collaboration with sound artist Alan Holmes, combines poetry with field recordings, looped vocals and interview fragments, and includes a poem in Welsh from special guest Siân Melangell Dafydd.