       |
Life
| 1974- ; b. Downpatrick, 27 Dec.; grew up in Ballyloughlin, Co. Down; studed at TCD (Dublin) for one year; continued English at QUB; grad. MA in English, Edinburgh Univ., where she read the Northern Irish poets; completed a dissertation on Mebdh McGuckian at QUB (“Reading Medbh McGuckian”, 2004); winner of Gregory Award, 2001; issued These Days (2004), winner of Forward Prize for Best First Collection; writer in residence, Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco), 2005; appt. Temp. Lect. at Univ. of Ulster, 2005; included in Poetry Book Society’s “Next Generation” presentation, 2005; |
| issued Drives (2008), in the form of postcards home to Belfast from foreign cities; winner of Forward Prize for Best Collection and shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and winner of Rooney Prize, 2008; broadcast her view of Belfast on The Essay (BBC3), 14 May 2009; her collection Profit and Loss (2011) recommended by Poetry Society, and shortlisted for T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize; issued Reading Medbh McGuckian (2014), a critical study; she is published by Cape Poetry; married with a daughter; lives in Belfast and holds post-doctoral Research Fellowship at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry (QUB); awarded The Irish Times Irish Poetry Now Award, March 2010; ed., with Frank Ormsby, The Yellow Nib (2015). |
|
[ top ]
Works| Poetry |
|
| Audio |
|
| Criticism |
|
| Miscellaneous (contrib. to) |
|
| Anthologies (incl. in) |
|
[ top ]
Bibliographical details
These Days (London: Jonathan Cape 2004), 64pp. CONTENTS [Poems]: Naming it; Acts of faith; Eeps; Come live with me; Without me; For Stuart who accidentally obtained a job in the civil service; Donegal; Festival time; Games; Brinkwomanship; Here; The amazing, disappearing; The second Mrs. de Winter; Without me; Without me; The miracle of F6/18; Without me; On the third floor for the royal infirmary; When I was sixteen I met Seamus Heaney; My dream mentor; Snow; Nocturne; Without me; What you get; Two crossings; Doyne; Pet deaths; A pause; It's a wonderful life; Bridges; Bed poem; Perl poem; Granite; The Franklin's tale; April, 7 p.m; The myth of tea boy; The morning after Ruth's going-away party; Holland; The magician; Satis house; Boys; The man with the hatchet; For Lily Allen; It's a wonderful life; The furthest distances I've travelled; 26; By my skin; Mangles; These days.The Radio (London: Jonathan Cape 2017), 64pp. CONTENTS [poems]: In the Beginning; Yellow Lullaby; Alzheimer’s Villanelle; Brunties: An Elegy; Poem in Praise of Hysterical Men and Women; Bobby Fischer: Very Displaced Elegy; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Radio; Listening to My Mother Listen to the Radio; Radio; August 30th 2013; Field of Yellow Flowers with Airplane and Standing Figure: Poem for Gavin Turning 40; Poem for Ruth in the Heatwave Summer of 1995; Out; Buddleia: Poem in Memory of Roberta Gray; Black Mould and Mildew: Obsessive-Compulsive Poem for Lawrence; Flights; Poem about all the Space I Told My Husband I Needed; Taking Blood; Fish in the Berlin Aquarium; Wives in Mid-Twentieth Century American Fiction; Give it Up, Moron; Government Servants; I Can't Say I Love You; Ode to Moy Park; Poem in Homage to Built Things in Three Dimensions; Malone Hoard; Glitch: Poem for 2016; Mast; First Dialogue; Second Dialogue; Third Dialogue.
Reading Medbh McGuckian (2014) - CONTENTS: Author’s Note; Introduction; Ch. 1: ‘Not Sacrificed to Plot ... ’; Ch. 2: ‘This Oblique Trance is My Natural Way of Speaking ... ’. Ch. 3: ‘A Hill Wind Blows at the Book’s Edges / To Open a Page ...’; Ch.04: ‘Clear Cut from Another World, as if Translating ...’; Ch.5: ‘The War Degree’; Conclusion; ‘Reading in a Library’; Bibliography; Index. Orig. as PhD dissertation - L. M. Flynn, “Reading Medbh McGuckian” (Belfast: QUB 2004); previously available at the British Library on World Wide Web and launched by Irish Academic Press in No Alibis Bookstore, Belfast, Wed. 30th April 2014.
Chris Agee, ed., The New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland (Cambridge: Salt 2011), xxicv, 247pp. [with Seamus Heaney; Derek Mahon; Michael Longley; Cathal Ó Searcaigh; Jean Bleakney; Chris Agee; Moyra Donaldson; Gary Allen; Andy White; Ciaran Carson; Medbh McGuckian; Paul Muldoon; Matt Kitkham; Georóid Mac Lochlainn; Frank Sewell; Paul Grattan; Sinéad Morrissey; Alan Gillis; Leontia Flynn; Nick Laird.]
[ Her 15-min. BBC broadcast on Belfast was available on podcast (14-20th May 2009) ].
[ top ]
Criticism
|
|
|
| Interview with Leontia Flynn at Culture Northern Ireland |
| —When did you first fall in love with poetry? —I don’t recall a watershed moment. I remember a Robert Louis Stevenson poem from Primary Three , and poems like “The Highwayman” from later school anthologies. Then when I was 14 I spent the whole summer writing nonsense poems, which seemed vitally necessary at the time. By the time I was 16 and starting Philip Larkin for A level it had happened gradually. Then I really fell for Larkin. (Sixteen year old school girl falls for Philip Larkin – all wrong, but unlike him I was ready to commit …) |
| Go online or see copy - as attached. |
[ top ]
Commentary
Fran Brearton, review of Drivein Tower Poetry (in 2009): ‘[...] Flynn’s is one of the most strikingly original and exciting poetic voices to have emerged from Northern Ireland since the extraordinary debut by [Paul] Muldoon 35 years ago. [...] refreshing in a Northern Irish poetic tradition at risk of taking itself as seriously as it has been taken by its critics. There is a different kind of risk, therefore, for Flynn in her debut collection too. At first glance, some of the poems seem throw-away, off-hand, brief jottings on the page rather than fully realised poetic achievement. Yet the assurance and skill required to hide those same qualities of assurance and skill is also what gives the ten-line seemingly ephemeral and anecdotal poems scattered across These Days [2004] their depth and originality. In a reversal of strategies adopted by one of her immediate precursors Medbh McGuckian, Flynn makes it seem easy, which, for her readers, can also make it that little bit harder to grasp what she is about. [...]’ (Available at Tower Poetry (Christ Church, Oxford) - online.]
Frances Leviston, review of Drives by Leontia Flynn, in The Guardian (30 Aug. 2008): ‘Leontia Flynn emerged fully-formed in 2004 with a first collection, These Days , that placed her at the centre of a new wave of Belfast poets - Alan Gillis, Nick Laird, Colette Bryce - who were bearing not only the history of that city but of its poetry with admirable ease. Drives , thankfully, does not break with the rapidly shifting intelligence, wit and fluent manipulation of sound that made These Days such an unexpected pleasure; but it does explore at greater length, and with greater focus, some of the preoccupations that were already powering Flynn’s earlier work. / The “drives” of the neat title are both noun and verb, and refer to the psychological patterns that Flynn sees - with a perhaps pathological sharpness, and a certainly unfashionable interest in Freud - governing her own life and the lives of others, as well as to all the journeys we make, and the means by which we make them, in this increasingly mobile world. [...] This is delicate, circumspect work, the syntax perfectly managed [...]’ (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library , “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct.)
Ben Wilkinson, ‘Critical Perspective: Leontia Flynn’, in Contemporary Writers on the British Council Website: ‘The eminent poet-critic Tom Paulin has described Leontia Flynn’s poetry as “smart as a whip, lyrical, always on point - the real, right thing”, and, given the freewheeling originality and assuredness of her debut collection, These Days (2004), it is hard to dissent from such a verdict.
Further: Wilkinson speaks of Drives as containing a ‘series of portraits of the lives of other poets and creative artists (reminiscent of those in Michael Hofmann’s Corona, Corona) [...] dotted throughout the book [which e]xploring subjects including Virginia Woolf’s bi-polar disorder and breakdowns, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s alcoholism, and Elizabeth Bishop’s loss of her mother to mental illness and consequent orphaning as a child, these portraits do not shirk from difficult themes and, contrary to first impressions and occasional lapses, succeed in reaffirming the resilience and capability of the individual in the face of considerable adversity. For while in the collection’s title poem, the poet’s mother “isn’t one to assign / meaning to [her children’s] ways, their worlds’ bewildering drives”, Flynn is conversely drawn to exploring the ways in which lives are, can be, and perhaps should be, lived; her poetry often looking for what she calls the “basic wage, take-what-you-get epiphany” wherever it might be found. Her occasionally repetitious subject matter aside, then, Flynn’s lyric abilities and stylistic flair offer the reader fascinating, often darkly comic poetic insight into the human condition and our existential concerns.’ (See further online; accessed 22.03.2011.)
[ top ]
|
[ top ]
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
[ top ]
Audiolinks
| Poems by Leontia Flynn at Poet Casting | ||||||||
|
||||||||
|
| Poems from These Days (2004) and Drives (2008) at the Poetry Archive | ||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
| —Go to Poetry Archve - online [crashed server at 12.08.2023] |
[ top ]
Notes
Profit and Loss (2011) [Publisher’s notice]: ‘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.’ (See COPAC - online.)