KNUTE Skinner is an American of the elegant, bohemian and laid back variety who has made Ireland home and befriended Limerick. Published by Jessie Lendennie’s Salmon Poetry many times and others, there is also a memoir, ‘Help me to a Getaway’ (2010). To my shame I have not read it but this poem ‘Something in the Grass’, spare and desperate and wild in its appeal to a life beyond scratch-dirt, suggests his early life is something.
A PhD in English from the Mid West, US, tending a turf bog and words is now Skinner’s preferred life.
Be not fooled. This man founded the Signpost Press, a nonprofit corporation devoted to publishing contemporary literature, and was a founder and editor of the Bellingham Review. Knute Skinner was awarded a fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts and has received residencies from the Huntington Hartford Foundation, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, and Fundación Valparaíso.
Something in the Grass
She is kicking at something in the grass,/ grass halfway up to her knees nearly,/ knees no doubt as coarse/ as her bare elbows.
Add a few years and she is my mother/ out in the yard kicking spirits away/ as she feeds the chickens.
Passing, I try not to stare/ but I take in a dirty-blonde head/ and a worn shirt open at a scrawny neck.
Beyond, I give her the crazed eyes/ that dog me from life to life.
Astrolabe Press, 2014’s ‘Dream of a City’ anthology
Rose Rushe
