Geraldine Monk – författare

Ghost & Other Sonnets will disturb and delight. Divided into three sections the sequence begins with the Ghost Sonnets. Using traditional ghost narratives Monk condenses them into the tightly controlled sonnet form and twists them into something totally new. Aficionados of ghost stories will revel in this reinvention of a popular genre. In the second section, & Sonnets there is a drastic mood change as personal experience and harrowing news items root the poems into the mundane world of everyday existence. Some of these poems delves into the dark reality of ‘unnatural’ happenings: the tragedies of the Beslan massacre or the Chinese cockle pickers whilst others rescue the banal and sweep it off into the realms of the fantastical. The final section, Other Sonnets inhabits the cusp between Ghost and &. Here chance and inexplicable coincidence meet in the ghostly multiplications of language.Working within the conventional form of the sonnet this sequence is on the surface one of Monk’s most accessible works but the simplicity is deceptive as each poem shifts and veers into unexpected complexity. Words shimmy down the page to their unpredictable conclusion leaving the reader delighted, disconcerted and baffled. Monk brings together disparate strands of uncertainty in a fragile world and she does it with her usual tenderness, ferocity and humour.

"This book is probably best described as a collective autobiography. With few exceptions the contributing poets write about their origins and influences and how they became involved in poetry. My main objective is to present the spirit of a brief era which, in retrospect, was exceptional in its momentum towards the democratisation and dissemination of poetry. The era or "cusp" I'm concentrating on is between World War II and the advent of the World Wide Web. Already extraordinary in its social, political and cultural upheaval, it seems even more heightened when set against the technological transformation which has since been unleashed."-from Geraldine Monk's introduction to this volume

A major selection from Monk’s work, including Interregnum in its entirety for the first time, here combined with new sequences not previously published. This is a substantial volume from a key British writer whose approachable experimental works are filled with wit, linguistic virtuosity and a sound grasp of the shifting realities of the worlds we live in.