Book description
Celebrated as an unusually original poet - nervy, refreshing,
deceptively simple - Leontia Flynn has quickly developed into a writer
of assured technical complexity and a startling acuity of perception.
In her third collection, Flynn examines and dismantles a fugitive
life. The first sequence moves through a series of rooms, reflecting
on aspects of the author's personal and family history. Using the idea
of the haunted house or the house with a sealed-off room, and Gothic
tropes of madness, doubles, revenants and religious brooding, the
poems consider ideas of inheritance and legacy.
The second section comprises a magnificent long poem written in the
months leading up to the banking crisis and presidential election of
October 2008. Taking as its occasion a flat-clearing, it assumes a
more public voice (inspired partly by Auden's 'Letter to Lord Byron'),
and reflects on aspects of the rapid social and technological change
of the last decade. An extraordinarily moving reflection on mutability
and mortality prompted by the spring-cleaning of a life's detritus,
'Letter to Friends' evolves from a private reliquary to a public
obsequy.
Its collapse back into private griefs, including the poet's father's
decline into Alzheimer's disease, is pursued in the third section of
the book. Here the theme of a tallying of private and public balance
sheets, of different kinds of profit and loss, widens to include poems
of motherhood and marriage, the possibilities of hope and repair.
Leontia Flynn was born in 1974 and lives in Belfast. Her first book,
These Days
, won the 2004 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second,
Drives
, was awarded the 2008 Rooney
Prize for Irish Literature. She is currently post-doctoral research
fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University.
