Leontia Flynn

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Note: Reading Medbh McGuckian (2014), launched by Irish Academic Press in No Alibis Bookstore, Belfast, Wed. 30th April 2014; previously a PhD dissertation as L. M. Flynn, “Reading Medbh McGuckian” (Belfast: QUB 2004) - available at the British Library on World Wide Web.

Anthologies: Joan McBreen, The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets - Poems & Essays (Moher: Salmonpoetry 1009) [q.pp.] contrib. ‘Out’, to Granta: The Magazine of New Writing, ed., Sigrid Rausing [Iss. 135: New Irish Writing], (Spring 2016).

[ Her 15-min. BBC broadcast on Belfast was available on podcast (14-20th May 2009) ].

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Criticism
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, ‘New Voices (Peter McDonald, Sinead Morrissey, Alan Gillis and Leontia Flynn)’, in Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968-2008 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer 2008), pp.249-86; Fran Brearton, review of Profit and Loss, in The Guardian (2 Sept. 2011) - available online; Erin C. Mitchell, ‘“To Sift / Through Old Boxes of Junk I’ve Kept”: Leontia Flynn’s Gifts of Museums’, in New Hibernia Review, 18, 2 (Summer 2014), pp.110-20; John MacAuliffe, ‘Serious about the butt of her jokes’, review of The Radio, in The Irish Times (18 Nov. 2017) - available online.

See also Ben Wilkinson, ‘Critical Perspective: Leontia Flynn’ at Contemporary Writers 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. [...’ &c. - online; accessed 02.03.2011.]

Commentary

Fran Brearton, review of Drive in 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.]

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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 version in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct.)

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Ben Wilkinson, ‘Critical Perspective: Leontia Flynn’, in Contemporary Writers on the British Council Website. ‘[...] If Flynn attempts to find an answer to this question in Drives, it is through the series of portraits of the lives of other poets and creative artists (reminiscent of those in Michael Hofmann’s Corona, Corona) that are dotted throughout the book. Exploring 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 20.06.2011.)

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Quotations

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Audiolinks ...

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Notes
Profit and Loss (2011) - summary: ‘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.)