I’m with Stupid!

‘As I set out to write – as I wrote – I asked myself, am I stupid?’ So begins the second poem (beginning on the second page) of Emily Skillings’s second collection, Tantrums in Air, a book preoccupied by doubts about the self and what it has to say. Proceeding with the same pleasingly unpredictable variety and slanting language of her debut, Fort Not (2017) – a collection of delightfully un-easeful poems that map the feeling of a lack of feeling in a culture of ambivalence, ‘a paralysis / brought on by the glimmering / bounty of the everyday’, writes Skillings, where the logic seems curved, ‘always slightly off-center’ – Tantrums in Air mounts an investigation of impostor syndrome, the poet’s nagging sense (both a deep anxiety and badge of honour) ‘that I am a ridiculous person // who will never be like the others’.

With a self-deprecating humour that seems only partly tongue-in-cheek, Skillings adopts a frequently defeated poetic persona, ‘part ghost, part sponge / a lump of pure refusal’. ‘Crushed again!’ jibes one poem, ‘down in the dirt / where I have always belonged.’ ‘Can I record you?’ asks a filmmaker in ‘Screen Test’, ‘I’m making a documentary for my class on the subject of giant losers.’ These doubts are the result of a pervasive sense of aftermath. While Skillings’s poetry is playful and often genuinely funny (which not all ‘funny’ poems are), the collection strikes a strangely elegiac tone, born of the uncertainty of what to do next, of how, exactly, to continue in the wake of certain losses. Chief among these, perhaps, is the loss of John Ashbery, for whom Skillings worked ...