Leontia Flynn

Leontia Flynn Poems

Leontia Flynn Biography

Born in County Down, northern Irish poet Leontia Flynn earned an MA at Edinburgh and a PhD in English on the poetry of Medbh McGuckian at Queen’s University Belfast.   Influenced by Philip Larkin, Flynn often makes use of received formal structures as she studies the scaffold of a life with dark humor and a tender attention to the mind’s shifting light. In a 2008 review of Drives for The Guardian, Frances Leviston praises the “currents of difficult feeling, beneath the wise, glittering fronts of her poems.” In a 2011 interview with J.P. O’Malley for Culture Northern Ireland, Flynn states, “I think in poetry you go a funny way around the houses to get your meaning across. I do tend to make noises and sound effects sometimes, rather than use words. Poetry is always aware of this non-linguistic other part of itself.” Flynn is the author of several full-length collections of poetry, including Profit and Loss (2011), Drives (2008), and These Days (2004), which won the Forward Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. She has also been awarded the Eric Gregory Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.   Flynn lives in Belfast.)

The Best Poem Of Leontia Flynn

Gerard Manley Hopkins

At the mention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, my mild-mannered father
— tender, abstracted — would exercise the right
to revert to type. That is to say: devout; that is, proscriptive. He would rather
we did not so bandy the good Jesuit's name about
in talk of "gay this" and "gay that" — just as he would rather
my sister did not, from the library, request "sick" Lolita.
Like tars on a stage deck, yo ho, we roll our eyes.
Somebody snaps on the poisonous gas-fired heater
— and I put off a year or two the hypothesis
I'll form, with a wave, to provoke him to these wobblers
that all in such matters swing from pole to pole;
as Hopkins was wont (his muse being bi[nsey] po[p]lar[s])
to swing from joy's heights, alas, to the abyss
and for whom the mind had "mountains; cliffs of fall."


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"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there....    " Who's not known the hell
that fashions itself from the third night without sleep — 
the third or the fourth — in whose black margins crawl
shrill horrors, and where breathless, poleaxed, pinned
 — as though in the teeth of an outrageous gale — 
the mind — sick — preys upon the stricken mind.
And "worst, there is none" — no none — than this wild grief:
Citalopram-wired. Our sweating selves self-cursed.
Oh, "Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?"
as Hopkins wrote — but, far gone, at its worst
it's her first form I want. Please stroke my hair.
It's alright now. I'm here, I'm here. There, there.

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