Where Landedness Ends: Gender, Power and Belonging in the Watery Poetry of Wendy Mulford, Frances Presley and Carol Watts

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article will establish how Wendy Mulford’s The East Anglia Sequence, Frances Presley’s Somerset Letters and Carol Watts’s Wrack explore the radical potential of reimagining female presence in terms of watery embodiment. Alongside attending to how identification with what Mulford calls the ‘sister sea’ allows these poets to work back against land-based experiences of economic, legal and political expropriation, this article will also explore the inevitable imbrication of differently constituted bodies of water within networks of political and economic exploitation, and the resulting ambiguity of watery becoming which shadows these texts. Given the formal qualities of poetic writing, this article is particularly interested in how these texts allow for consideration of what a hydropoetics might look like and how these poems begin to suggest ways for language to become unmoored from its conventionally terrestrial sites of articulation.