At the Skin Resort is a collection poetry set in Central and Eastern Europe and written in the years following the revolutions of 1989. The poet, James Sutherland-Smith went there to work early in 1989 and found himself caught up in th events of that time. He has settled in Slovakia which is a country in the heart of the Slavonic nations and subject to the various influences and pressures from north, south,east and west. It is a place of astonishing variety interms of culture, history and nature and is exemplary for recent and more ancient history. Sutherland-Smith's poems are not, however, travel poems, but poems whose significance communicates beyond their locale.