Invisible Sun

Following Viktor Shklovsky’s instruction to make everyday objects seem

unfamiliar, Richard Skinner’s fourth collection sets out to release ‘the

potential of inanimate objects’. A marbled egg, white balloons, unopened

boxes, a Greek island, numbers, a yellow yo-yo – nothing in this book is

quite what it seems. Unsettling, precise and enigmatic, Invisible Sun confirms

Skinner’s reputation as a poet of playful misplacement and misdirection. It is a book about windows, light, clouds, the ‘upside down world’ glimpsed through shadows and mists, and always the invisible sun – bright source of all life but also our daily measure of time and loss – illuminating ‘the distant glitter of other people’s lives’.