The Radio

Brilliant new collection by prize-winning Belfast poet 
 
Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, The Radio is an outstanding book from a poet who is not only one of the best writers of her generation but who seems, more and more, to be the voice of that generation.

Leontia Flynn’s The Radio sees one of Northern Ireland’s most assured voices continue her engagement with the alchemy of form in an effortlessly contemporary manner, indeed driving the thought thrillingly through longer stanza forms, including a brilliant elegy for Heaney. Theexposure of family, and its intimate matrix of the generations, to the equal threats of history and human frailty is played out in work with an intense sense of place and moment.

W.N. Herbert, chair of the judges of the 2017 Eliot Prize

Anybody with an interest in poetry should be reading Leontia Flynn. Those with no interest should be reading her too: she has what it takes to overcome resistance. All mothers – especially new mothers – should read her. Her understanding of what it is to be a woman is one of the things (by no means the only thing) that makes this collection so powerful. Her thinking is complicated but never arrogantly inaccessible. I was bowled over by this, her fourth collection. I kept returning to poems for the sheer pleasure of them – no slog involved.

The Radio sparkles with 21st-century chutzpah, sometimes offset by maternal angst.

Funny, touching, satirical, breathtaking and dazzling by turns, packed full of exceptional poems.

Flynn breathes the new life of an entirely contemporary voice into a seemingly traditional stanzaic structure.

Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize 
 
In her fourth collection, Leontia Flynn rehearses and resolves the concerns and forms of previous books, beginning with a sequence written in the aftermath of her father’s death from Alzheimer’s disease and during the care of her daughter in infancy. Moving on to explore the constructed nature of childhood, via a long poem imagining her mother’s experiences in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and in an elegy for Seamus Heaney, the poems also seek to contrast the isolation and privacy of an experience of family life with increasingly pervasive and relentless digital technologies. 
 
Drawing on a range of other voices and literary exemplars, including a tradition of verse drama and dialogues, and particularly Plath’s ‘Three Women’, The Radio sees writing poems as a communication that begins with an act of interior listening, for sounds and forms, and to personal sources of meaning. 
 
The Radio explores the pressure the interior life faces from both the usual quotidian struggles and the new stridency and quick-fire certainties of virtual communication. Showing her superb mastery of form, Leontia Flynn’s poems are fragile, funny, observant and engaging – reminding us, once again, of her originality and importance.

Profit and Loss

The third collection from the prize-winning Irish poet.

An outstanding Audenesque long poem, “Letter to Friends” makes this book essential reading, as it brilliantly captures the zeitgeist…

My favourite book was Profit and Loss by Leontia Flynn, demonstrating her unrivalled capacity as a good-humoured but devastating observer of the modern secular scene. “Letter to Friends”, Flynn’s long poem about the way we live now, is a masterpiece.

Flynn’s place as one of the strongest and most skilful poetic voices of her generation is confirmed in Profit and Loss… [In “Letter to Friends”] like Auden, she addresses important issues here in a language that is both playful and serious, and in a form that is, if not “large enough to swim in”, at least robust enough to contain the many concerns she raises in it, from the delights and torments of personal and familial memory to the function and value of poetry in (postmodern) society.

…A stunning third collection. Though she’s the youngest poet on the T.S. Eliot shortlist, Flynn writes with a sharp-eyed almost fatalistic wisdom.  Her striking 320-line poem in iambic pentameter “Letter to Friends”, could be described as a State of the Union address – one that is highly personal but that takes stock of the larger world.  It is this broad view that is one of her great strengths, as is her tone: sometimes earnest, sometimes irreverent, but invariably appealing.

Leontia Flynn disentangles complicated feelings with extraordinary elan and maturity. She has a natural's feel for cadence and melody, and launches her singing line boldly and with a propulsion that energises her often elaborate syntax... Affectionate and truculent by turns, disenchanted but relishing the world around her, quick-witted and big-hearted, Leontia Flynn looks like the real thing

Leontia Flynn really has something special...the achieved voice and assurance of a poet who knows exactly what she is talking about.

Flynn's is one of the most strikingly original and exciting poetic voices to have emerged from Northern Ireland since the extraordinary debut by Muldoon 35 years ago... She doesn't put a foot wrong on the page.

A witty, often poignant, auditing of the poet's life and times... A serious book, engaged with the world in which we live; and it is engaging too - thoughtful, prescient and eminently readable. Flynn's humour, her ability to entertain, and her astute powers of observation are wonderful gifts. She is one of the most original and accomplished poets of her generation.

Cape enlarges its excellent stable of poets with Belfast-born Leontia Flynn.

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 Profit and Loss, her third collection, Flynn examines and dismantles a fugitive life. In a remarkable extended sequence, she takes a long hard look at time spent in the shared and rented flats of a 'half-baked Belfast demimonde' - places of cheap wine, dodgy landlords, potted plants and neglect - from a position of relative safety. The poet then takes another leap: showing a mastery of formal rhyme as she relaxes into the effortless, rangy rhythms of the long title poem - an extraordinarily moving reflection on mutability and mortality prompted by the spring-cleaning of a life's detritus. Going though the memento mori of cassettes, old photographs, address books, 'boarding passes, rail cards, ticket stubs', the poem evolves from a private reliquary to a public obsequy - for a life unexamined until now. Beginning with flood and ending with the gold of an opening sky and a baby daughter, 'Profit and Loss' offers the possibilities of hope and repair, and casts its raking light over the whole collection - throwing it all into a deep, satisfying relief.

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.

These Days

Stunning first collection by young Belfast poet.

Bursting with tender, witty, punchy poems about the tender aftermath of a love affair.

These Days represents one of the most strikingly original debuts in recent years and won the 2004 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Leontia Flynn - still in her twenties - writes about Belfast and the north of Ireland with a precision and tenderness that is completely fresh. While her subject matter ranges from memories of childhood to the instabilities of adulthood, from the raw domestic to the restless pull of 'elsewhere', her theme throughout is a search for physical and mental well-being, for a way to live a life. A number of exquisitely moving poems about her father highlight her extraordinary gifts: her exact ear, her heightened, filmic sensibility, her bittersweet tone - all of which combine in poems that are accessible but not obvious, witty and serious, delicate but tough, and always surprising. 
 
These Days is not simply a first book of great promise; it marks the arrival of a new, exciting and important voice.

Drives

The second collection by the award-winning poet

Following on from the assured day-to-day poems of her first collection, Leontia Flynn's second, Drives, is a book of restless journeys - real and imaginary - interspersed with a series of sonnets on writers. Beginning in Belfast, where she lives, she visits a disjointed number of cities in Europe and the States - each one the occasion for an elliptical postcard home to herself. 
 
Alongside these reports from abroad, portraits of dead writers flicker through the pages of this book - Baudelaire, Proust and Beckett; Bishop, Plath and Virginia Woolf - all revealing aspects of themselves, their frailties and their sicknesses, but also, we suspect, aspects of their ventriloquising author. 
 
What these poems share is a furious refusal of received opinion, of a language recycled and redundant; they are raw exposed and angrily aware of distance - the distance between what one needs and what one receives, between love and what is lost. In particular, the lives here are haunted by the lost idyll of childhood, while poems about the poet's own mother and ageing father bring the collection to a close. With an alert ear for fracture and disarray and a tender eye for damage, Drives is a passionate enquiry into what shapes us as individuals.

Leontia Flynn

Anybody with an interest in poetry should be reading Leontia Flynn. Those with no interest should be reading her too: she has what it takes to overcome resistance. All mothers - especially new mothers - should read her... Her thinking is complicated but never arrogantly inaccessible. I was bowled over

Flynn captures the tension between poetry as a personal impulse for freedom, and the human tethering to world events… A thought-provoking, calming response to this 'intricate, coping life'

Michael Longley, author of The Slain Birds

One of the most original and accomplished poets of her generation

One of the most strikingly original and exciting poetic voices to have emerged from Northern Ireland since the extraordinary debut by Muldoon thirty-five years ago... She doesn't put a foot wrong on the page

Fran Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry

Surefooted and unsettling, Leontia Flynn's poems negotiate the cracks that lie below the surfaces of things. Reading them, we see the world differently

Ciaran Carson, author of Belfast Confetti

A poet who is not only one of the best writers of her generation but who seems, more and more, to be the voice of that generation

John McAuliffe, author of The Kabul Olympics

Makes clear what many people have known for the best part of two decades: she is one of the very best poets writing in Ireland in the twenty-first century. Taking Liberties is a consolidation of various strands of her poetic lives: musical without being conventional, funny without playing to the choir, scholarly without being exclusionary, dark without being morbid

A collection about motherhood at a time of continuous crisis - from one of Ireland's most important poets 
 
'Everyone should be reading her' 
OBSERVER 
 
'One of the most accomplished poets of her generation' 
GUARDIAN 
 
These poems emerge from the experience of being a single mother in Belfast, and against a background of seemingly continuous crisis. Political upheaval and anxiety, violence and death are all registered in these poems, which ask questions about where independence is balanced by our relationships with others, and where our inner lives meet the globally connected world. 
 
These are poems about cities - living, travelling and working in cities, getting sick and dying in cities - but also about retreating from all that: to her daughter at home, the budgie, cat and tortoise, or escaping to the park, the municipal pool, the Irish countryside, Newfoundland, or Paris, or into a Nina Simone song. 
 
This is a necessary book - a book very much of our time - with a consistent tone that is brave and bleak, but which also carries with it some much-needed humour, and a wealth of beautiful writing.

Leontia Flynn

Praise for Taking Liberties

Anybody with an interest in poetry should be reading Leontia Flynn. Those with no interest should be reading her too: she has what it takes to overcome resistance. All mothers - especially new mothers - shoul ...

Flynn captures the tension between poetry as a personal impulse for freedom, and the human tethering to world events… A thought-provoking, calming response to this 'intricate, coping life'

The real thing

Anybody with an interest in poetry should be reading Leontia Flynn. Those with no interest should be reading her too: she has what it takes to overcome resistance. All mothers - especially new mothers - shoul ...

Flynn captures the tension between poetry as a personal impulse for freedom, and the human tethering to world events… A thought-provoking, calming response to this 'intricate, coping life'

The real thing

Anybody with an interest in poetry should be reading Leontia Flynn. Those with no interest should be reading her too: she has what it takes to overcome resistance. All mothers - especially new mothers - shoul ...

Flynn captures the tension between poetry as a personal impulse for freedom, and the human tethering to world events… A thought-provoking, calming response to this 'intricate, coping life'

The real thing

Books by Leontia Flynn

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