Animal Crackers

Monk, Geraldine

Literature & Fiction

Writers' Forum

Poetry. "Eerie, violent . . . an exhilarating flux of human-animal-alien corporealities approximated in language"-Object Permanence. Geraldine Monk's NOCTIVAGATIONS collects poems and performance pieces written since the mid-1990s. Many are published here for the first time and range from the performance work "Hidden Cities" commissioned by the Ruskin School of Fine Art to her collaborations with the composer Martin Archer. "Genuine word magic . . . a wonderful poet: revelatory, intense, ever surprising"-Yorkshire Post. THE SWAY OF PRECIOUS DEMONS is also available at SPD.

Noctivagations

Poetry

West House Books

Geraldine Monk is one of Britain's foremost contemporary poets. This new collection from features the controversial A Nocturnall Upon St Lucies Day, a newly revised Raccoon and three  new sequences: Glow in the Darklunar Calendar, Print & Pin and Poppyheads.

Lobe Scarps & Finials

Leafe Press

<p>FREE VERSE EDITIONS | Series Editor: Jon Thompson | At the heart of THEY WHO SAW THE DEEP is the nature of water; water as giver and taker of life, luxuriant and lethal in equal measures. From the Libyan Sea to the savage sands of Morecambe Bay to the banks of the River Lune in the north of England where the poet's ancestors were rowed across the river in their coffins to their final resting place. The eponymous sequence of poems finds the poet in the illusory safety of her kitchen whilst the outer world grows increasingly disturbed with wars and wild weather. It is set against the backdrop of the shipping forecast and weaves the myths and legends of the ancient Mesopotamians through a litany of migrations down the ages to the present day. | "Geraldine Monk's poetry is a treasure and THEY WHO SAW THE DEEP is extravagant proof. A vocabulary ripe to the point of ferment. Lines lithe and various. Gritty dazzle. Vertiginous control. The title sequence is a water-torn triumph, a mercurial inventory of birds, wars, seas, weathers, vegetables and wrecks. With kinetic brilliance and valorous abandon, Monk forages the deeps." - Catherine Wagner | "Her poetry is always a cause for celebration...a carnival zone, various, gracious, outrageous. It unleashes the energy of wit into the field force of language itself, wit as an improvisatory method crafting voices through electrically alive craftiness." - Adam Piette, POETRY REVIEW | "Monk's poetry crackles with oppositions: between the individualism of lyric utterance and the political context in which it takes place; between the opacity produced by her densely-patterned sounds and a plain-spoken brusqueness." - Paul Batchelor, THE GUARDIAN | GERALDINE MONK'S POETRY was first published in the 1970s and has appeared in countless magazines and anthologies. Her main collections include Interregnum (Creation Books) and Escafeld Hangings (West House Books). The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk edited by Scott Thurston appeared in 2007, and in 2012 she edited the collective autobiography of selected British poets in Cusp: Recollections of Poetry in Transition (Shearman Books). She is an affiliated poet at the Centre of Poetry and Poetics at The University of Sheffield, U.K.</p>

They Who Saw the Deep

Parlor Press

Poetry. "Geraldine Monk writes with a directness and pure sensuous verve that is rare among those working in an experimental way"--North Dakota Quarterly.

The Sway of Precious Demons

North and South

<p>Poetry. 'Escafeld' is the Anglo-Saxon name for Sheffield. in ESCAFELD HANGINGS Geraldine Monk trawls through this 'City of Eternal Construction' concentrating mainly on the enigmatic figure of Mary Queen of Scots who was imprisoned there from 1570 until 1584. Without assuming personae ESCAFELD HANGINGS offers a psychological mapping of political imprisonment with its implications for our own time. It also presents a Queen of Scots who escapes into the future and talks as freely of Ikea and the Robin Hood Airport as of stomachers and jesters. In the final sequence Monk views our contemporary political landscape from the seclusion of her garden shed. Includes a CD of a performances of Mary Through the Looking Glass by Geraldine Monk and Ligia Roque.</p>

Escafeld Hangings

When I first began my research into the Pendle witches in 1984 it proved exceedingly difficult to unearth any serious literature on the subject. Like many Lancastrians I first heard of the witches through the oral tradition of local myths and legends which had been passed down through the centuries but trying to discover the reality behind the folklore was, at the time, a struggle. The handful of local guide books available tended to cloak uncomfortable reality with cartoon images of haggish women with pointy hats, pointy noses and broomsticks; the template witch so beloved by children. Harsh facts were tagged on or sketchily embedded in the jokey safety of harum-scarum fantasy and consumer-friendly witchery.The complex reality of these unlucky hill people caught up in their time, belief systems, religious persecution and the ambitions of petty officials is infinitely more disturbing and compelling than the clichéd merchandise of the Halloween circus served up by today's supermarkets or the trite albeit entertaining motifs of Hammer Horror films. It became increasingly obvious that the truth behind this sad and messy episode from our past was an inconvenience few wanted to deal with.Collusion and reinforcement of the oblique misogyny and class snobbery that ran through many of these narratives suggested that the octogenarian matriarchs Anne Whittle (Chattox) and Elizabeth Southern (Demdike) were indisputably witches because they were elderly peasant women whereas the gentlewoman Alice Nutter was almost always excused and explained away as being a Roman Catholic. This type of ill-considered value judgment was meted out and made more depressing by an unquestioning reiteration of such notions.When I finally tracked down a dog-eared transcript of Thomas Potts' account of the witch trials in my local reference library (so rare at the time I was not allowed to borrow it) it was a revelation to read an eyewitness account. A real version of reality rather than a version of fantasy. So piece by piece, year by year I gathered as much information as I could for my series of poems on the Pendle witches and in 1994 it was published by Creation Books under the title Interregnum.The original version of Interregnum contained one section based on autobiographical material and one concerned with people who had special connections to Pendle such as the founder of the Quaker movement George Fox, who had his vision on Pendle Hill and was also incarcerated in Lancaster Castle, and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who taught at Stonyhurst college in the shadow of Pendle. There was also a scattering of contemporary references and quotes from, for example, the Birmingham Six (tried at Lancaster Castle) and the wrongfully imprisoned Stefan Kiszko.For this 400th commemorative edition I am reproducing the two sets of monologues, retaining the original idea of having one monologue under the popular folklore name, e.g. Squintin Lizzie, and the second under the birth name, e.g. Elizabeth Device. I have however altered the presentation so that the monologues are in pairs rather than in two different sections as in the original. I have also included three additional 'Chantcasters' monologues. It is worth noting that all the words in these three poems, bar three lines, are reworkings of poems which Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote whilst he was in residence at Stonyhurst College. I was spurred on to do this reworking by one of the guide book authors who had reproduced the rather fine three lined 'witches spell' and dismissed it as 'gobbledegook'. There was no recognition that the caprice of circumstance which can make the difference between being condemned to die as a witch or being celebrated as Jesuit poet-priest could be one of time, gender and class.

Pendle Witch Words

Knives Forks and Spoons

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