Knute Skinner – författare

Concerned Attentions is Knute Skinner's first book of poetry since his collected edition, Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007, appeared from Salmon. As his readers may expect, the new work exhibits his artful and often moving, unnerving, or humourous turns of phrase. Moreover, it displays the poet's continuing fascination with the tenuous relationship between the quotidian and the otherworldly.

Knute Skinner was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but for fifty years has had a home in County Clare, where he now lives with his spouse Edna Faye Kiel. His collected edition Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007, from Salmon, contained new work along with work taken from thirteen previous books. His collection The Other Shoe won the 2004-2005 Pavement Saw Chapbook Award. A limited edition of his poems, translated into Italian by Roberto Nassi, was published by Damocle Edizioni, Chioggia, Italy, in 2011. A memoir, Help Me to a Getaway, was published by Salmon in March 2010.

What Trudy Knows and Other Poems follows the ground broken by Knute Skinner's last collection The Bears and Other Poems. An unusual group of poems - each a brief telling of a moment in the life of one or more imaginary characters. The poems probe a variety of human relationships. As Aidan Murphy wrote of The Bears: "A stunning collection, full of mystery, cross-purpose, weird and tragic characters... reminiscent of the short stories of the American Raymond Carver loaded with shocks and unspoken nuances of dirty realism." What Trudy Knows continues this radical departure, with verve.Knute Skinner lives in Killaspuglonane, County Clare, his home for the past thirty-eight years. His poetry has appeared widely in Ireland, Britain, Australia and North America. For some years he taught literature and creative writing part of each year at Western Washington University. He has worked as director of the Signpost Press and editor of The Bellingham Review, as well as serving on the editorial board of New Series-Departures. He is the author of 13 collections of poetry, 6 of them with Salmon Poetry, and he has poems in numerous anthologies, including Irish Poetry Now and Or Volge L'Anno-At the Year's Turning: An Anthology of Irish Poets Responding to Leopardi. He is married to Edna Faye Kiel, who is the subject of some of these poems. His most recent collection of poetry, Fifty Years: 1957-2007, was published by Salmon in 2007.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Knute Skinner has had a home in Ireland since 1964. He has taught at the University of Iowa and at Western Washington University, where he was a Professor of English. Retired from teaching, he lives in Killaspuglonane, County Clare with his spouse, Edna Faye Kiel. This book collects fifty years of published work, beginning with poems which first saw serial publication in 1957 and continuing through thirteen books."He has poems that for sheer beauty take your head off." John Gardner on 'A Close Sky over Killaspuglonane'"If you want to know how real poetry reads, buy this book, read it, and keep it." Leonard Blackstone on Selected Poems"In a time when many poets cannot resist the grand gesture, Skinner's art is the achievement of presence in the places we go to: in field, kitchen, bar, dictionary, anecdote, joke, love bower."James Liddy on 'Learning to Spell "Zucchini"'"This is a stunning collection, full of mystery, cross-purposes, weird and tragic characters, and should be read from start to finish."Aidan Murphy on The Bears & Other Poems"It's worth whatever stretches might be required to put it into your personal library." Joseph Green

“Nothing.

Just standing here.

That’s all I’m doing.”

So begins one poem in Knute Skinner’s latest collection, The Life That I Have. Like so many of these taut lyric-narratives, “Doing Nothing at All” affects a wry, rueful tone only to draw the reader toward the brink of some considerable existential, even metaphysical gravitas—as when a strong current runs below a seemingly placid surface so the reader hardly knows, at first, that they are quietly being swept away. Whether a couple at breakfast recollecting a first meeting, or a man confronting a life-quandary proposed by a half-eaten apple, or the poet himself considering the “thin hold” of a fallen limb on his garden’s cypress tree, the lives captured so intensively in Skinner’s poems never fail to glimpse and record the “fine print” of the soul. The flames confined behind the grate in his marvelous poem “The Fire” “would consume the world,” yet the poet recognizes “it is I who must bring the world to the fire.” Now nearing ninety, Knute Skinner for more than six decades has been doing just that to the fire of his imagination—vitally, consistently, indelibly.

Daniel Tobin