ALSO BY LEONTIA FLYNN
These Days
Drives
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Leontia Flynn
Title Page
Part One
The Dream House
The Oven
‘The Notorious Case of Robert the Painter’
The Flats
The Doctors
Reminders
The Bullfight
Inside the Catedral Nueva
Mellaril
The Girl Upstairs
The Day We Discovered Pornography in the Mail
The Peace Lily
The Vibrator
After the Funeral
The Yanks
The Exorcism
The Help-Line
The Examination Room
Two Ways of Looking at an Ultrasound Scan
I Once Lived in a Railway Carriage Flat
Anecdote
The Floppy Disk
The Superser
Colette
My Father’s Language
There’s Birds in My Story
The Dodgy Porch Light
The Pin-Hole Camera
Room in April
Part Two
Letter to Friends
Part Three
Five Obvious Catullus Versions
Cyd Charisse
A Plane
Bubbles
Magpies
Wedding Weather
Acknowledgements
Copyright
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.
About the Author
Leontia Flynn was born in 1974 and lives in Belfast. Her first book, These Days, won the 2004 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second, Drives, was awarded the 2008 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. She is currently post-doctoral research fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University.
for Maire, Andy, Éabha and Minnie
Fourth on your list is a mid-price, brick mid-terrace
. . . what a surprise. The agent lets you in.
The first thing you see is a vase of wilted flowers
on a pot-stand, then the Stannah stairlift paused,
eternally it seems, up the narrow steps.
The bathroom tour confirms it. One surgical glove
lies stranded, grasping, by a beige commode.
Did the old and – ha ha ha – possibly ill
owner … move somewhere bigger then? you squeak.
You bolt back out to the brittle, too-bright street.
The scores on the lino, the boot-print on the door.
You thought of the ancient filth of student flats,
and of their sad and subtle narratives:
the balled-up tights retrieved from a sofa back,
the mattress flipped to show its chalky stain.