CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Leontia Flynn
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Song
Belfast
Dhillon Sees the Ocean: The Odyssey
‘Country Songs’
Pastoral
Casablanca, Backwards
Virginia Woolf
Leaving Belfast
Howard Hughes
Personality
Samuel Beckett
Olive Schreiner
Sky Boats
Monaco
Beausoleil
Barcelona
Rome
The Little Mermaid
The Human Fish
Paris
Berlin
Boxes
Poem for Christmas
Joe and Úna’s Boat
Poem for New Year
Marcel Proust
Charles Baudelaire’s Mother
LA
Washington
New York
Dorothy Parker
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Alfred Hitchcock
Elizabeth Bishop
Airports
Robert Lowell
Saturday in the Pool
Don’t Worry
Wants
A Head for Figures
George Orwell’s Death
Cyprus Avenue
Annie Hall
Sylvia Plath’s Sinus Condition
‘We Use Brilliantine’
Miloš
For the Suicide in the Tate Modern
Drive
Winter Light
Our Fathers
Spring Poem
Dungeness
Poem for an Unborn Child
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you
and your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension of both at last . . .
‘Arrival at Santos’, Elizabeth Bishop
Freud had an interesting theory, the Oedipal theory. You know that all men, he said, want to sleep with their moms. I thought that was bullshit, until one day I saw a picture of Freud’s mom . . .
Bill Hicks
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 was born in 1974 and lives in Belfast. Her first book, These Days, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University.
Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following:
Agni, An Sionnach, Blue Nose, Edinburgh Review, Magnetic North: the Emerging Poets, New Welsh Review, Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, The Times Literary Supplement, The Ulster Tatler, The Yellow Nib
The author is grateful to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for an award under the Support for Individual Artists Programme 2004, the Ireland Fund and the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco.
‘Robert Lowell’ incorporates a phrase from his poem ‘Skunk Hour’. ‘Dorothy Parker’ begins with the line with which her poem ‘Resumé’ ends and ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’ begins with the opening line of his essay ‘The Crack Up’. ‘Belfast’ contains a line from ‘Belfast’ by Louis MacNeice. Elsewhere borrowings by other writers are indicated or paraphrased.
for my parents
These Days