AustLit

'Deftly working across both verse and visual poetry, Skilbeck-Porter gathers aesthetic experience and layers thought and memory, structuring the collection through the central motif of the municipal swimming pool, where fragments of thought and observation swim and float to the surface. Observational, attentive, and at times surreal, Skilbeck-Porter’s work immerses the reader in a sensory experience that delights the eye and the mind. These Are Different Waters is the first iteration of what Skilbeck-Porter terms a ‘poetics of no division,’ where everything is permitted and boundaries are traversed, emphasising interrelatedness and fluidity without hierarchy. It is a sublime and accomplished debut from a poet who has been working in concrete and verse poetry for over a decade.

'Conceptual, droll and formally experimental, These Are Different Waters disposes its wide-ranging materials into an elegant two-part structure: ‘Inflatable pool’, and the substantial visual sequence, ‘Concrete Pool’. Skilbeck-Porter dares to devise her own weird syntax of hallucinatory profusion, a through-composed ‘ink spell’ of restless, post-Steinian parataxis. Decisive and yet dreamy, its poetic bricolage, ‘a stratosphere of shifting surfaces’, resists closure and passes the baton: ‘The end of my swim, the beginning of yours’. Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award Judges' (Publication summary)