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

THE FURTHEST DISTANCES I'VE TRAVELLED

Like many folk, when first I saddled a rucksack,
feeling its weight on my back -
the way my spine
curved under it like a meridian -

I thought: Yes. This is how
to live. On the beaten track, the sherpa pass, between Krakow
and Zagreb, or the Siberian white
cells of scattered airports;

it came clear as over a tannoy
that in restlessness, in anony
mity:
was some kind of destiny.

So whether it was the scare stories about Larium
- the threats of delirium
and baldness - that lead me, not to a Western Union
wiring money with six words of Lithuanian,

but to this post office with a handful of bills
or a giro; and why, if I'm stuffing smalls
hastily into a holdall, I am less likely
to be catching a greyhound from Madison to Milwaukee

than to be doing some overdue laundry
is really beyond me.
However,
when, during routine evictions, I discover

alien pants, cinema stubs, the throwaway
comment - on a post-it - or a tiny stowaway
pressed flower amid bottom drawers,
I know these are my souvenirs

and, from these crushed valentines, this unravelled
sports sock, that the furthest distances I've travelled
have been those between people. And what survives
of holidaying briefly in their lives.

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