Geraldine Monk’s Restless Soil

Abstract

As one might expect, given her declared interest in what she describes as ‘the emotional geography of place’ (Monk, 2009), the poetry of Geraldine Monk is firmly centred within the localities of the northern English cities in which most of her work has been written. Monk, originally from Lancashire, has lived in Sheffield, Yorkshire, for many years, and this city provides the focus for the poems I will discuss later in this chapter. However, it is not just place, but a deterritorializing relationship between place and language that marks her approach to the city as a site of linguistic crossings in which gendered, class, regional and national identities are navigated through a poetics of (to borrow her phrase) ‘restless soil’ (Monk, 2005, p. 31). I will first consider the role of embodiment and performance in her writing before looking in more detail at the ways in which her poetry works against the time-space compression of global capitalism to recover English as a multilayered temporal accretion of languages with specific, though always changing, relationships to place. Monk’s English, spoken from urban locations in the north of the UK that occupy a culturally marginal position in relation to London, is recast as a set of shifting positions from which the power of English as a global language may be critiqued and its intrinsic heterogeneity revealed. The forms of movement and translation that emerge in this process are crucial to her presentation of English as a foreignized language, since they prevent regional or national essentialism from being reinscribed in what could otherwise become a binary and self-perpetuating tension between local and global.