‘Skelton’s creative mapping, then, offers a way of reading the Romantic text.’

David Cooper (The Problem of Precedent: Mapping the Post-Romantic Lake District)

Erosions (2020)

Following on from Still Glides the Stream (2013), Erosions revists Wordsworth’s Duddon sonnets, imagining a flow of water across the double-page spread from left to right. The residual poem on the facing page shows only the punctuation intact, with all constituent letters deposited at the end of each line. The subsequent poems in the series perform variations on this theme, but this time each poem is derived from the work of Sir Walter Scott.

In the first four poems, a single line is repeatedly eroded until nothing is left — in each iteration the eroded material is deposited beneath. In the final four poems, the same process is undertaken, but the eroded material is deposited on the facing page. In these last eight poems, Erosions therefore performs a kind of time-lapse unwriting, documenting the gradual disintegration of a text.

Erosions was originally produced in 2020, and first published in the new edition of Limnology. Further experiments in the series were published in a standalone pamphlet in 2021.

[Limnology at Corbel Stone Press]