Leontia Flynn Books

Focusing on the complexities of Medbh McGuckian's poetry, this study by Leontia Flynn offers insightful close readings of her work from early to mid-career. It highlights the poet's innovative use of diverse sources in her language and explores her evolving style over three decades. The analysis encourages readers to reconsider notions of clarity and coherence in poetry, while also emphasizing the mysteries within McGuckian's verses. This book serves as a critical resource for understanding her contributions to women's perspectives in literature.

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.

Taking Liberties is the fifth collection by Leontia Flynn, regarded by many as one of Ireland's most important poets. 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 - as always with Leontia Flynn - a wealth of beautiful writing.

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.

The collection features deeply moving poems centered on the poet's relationship with her father, showcasing her remarkable talent. This debut work stands out for its originality and emotional depth, marking the emergence of a significant new voice in contemporary poetry.

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. 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.