His first book of poetry, Stranger with a Watch, appeared in 1965 and contained early poems written in Iowa. His second collection, A Close Sky over Killaspuglonane (1968), showed the influence of the people and the landscape of rural Clare. Since then, he has published nine more books and eight chapbooks. His poems, which have appeared widely in serial publications in Ireland, England, Australia and North America, show a variety of styles, including both free and formal verse. Two collections, The Bears and What Trudy Knows, demonstrate a marked departure from his usual lyric mode, as the poems are all fictional narratives highlighting brief moments in the lives of the imagined narrators. In 2007 Salmon Poetry brought out a collected edition, Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007 and in 2010 Salmon published a memoir, Help Me to a Getaway. A limited edition of his poems, translated into Italian by Roberto Nassi, was published by Damocle Edizioni, Chioggia, Italy, in 2011. His most recent collections are Concerned Attentions, Salmon, 2013, and Against All Odds, Lapwing Publications, 2016.

Skinner founded the Signpost Press, a nonprofit corporation devoted to publishing contemporary literature, and he was a founder and editor of the Bellingham Review. He 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, Fundación Valparaíso, and the Heinrich Böll Association. He has taught numerous poetry writing workshops in the United States and in Ireland.