These Days

by Leontia Flynn

These Days represents one of the most strikingly original debuts in recent years and won the 2004 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Leontia Flynn - still in her twenties - writes about Belfast and the north of Ireland with a precision and tenderness that is completely fresh. While her subject matter ranges from memories of childhood to the instabilities of adulthood, from the raw domestic to the restless pull of 'elsewhere', her theme throughout is a search for physical and mental well-being, for a way to live a life. A number of exquisitely moving poems about her father highlight her extraordinary her exact ear, her heightened, filmic sensibility, her bittersweet tone - all of which combine in poems that are accessible but not obvious, witty and serious, delicate but tough, and always surprising. These Days is not simply a first book of great promise; it marks the arrival of a new, exciting and important voice.

Genres: Poetry, Irish Literature

64 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 30, 2004

About the author

Leontia Flynn (b.1974) is a poet from Northern Ireland. She grew up in Ballyloughlin, County Down. She studied English Literature at Queen's University Belfast followed by a masters in writing and cultural politics at Edinburgh University. She later returned to Queen's to complete her PhD.

Flynn has been Research Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University Belfast, since 2005 and currently edits the journal The Yellow Nib with Frank Ormsby. As of February 2014, she is the Seamus Heaney Poet-in-Residence at the Bloomsbury Hotel, London.

Reviews

[Mark Schultz · Rating 3 out of 5]

These Days, by Leontia Flynn, 2004. I have recently been asking for suggestions of contemporary Irish poets for me to read. Long a lover of Yeats and Heaney and a smattering of others, I am in search of another body of work by a poet of depth and skill.

Leontia Flynn was one whose name was mentioned. These Days is her first of three published books of poetry, and was highly acclaimed when it came out. Reading it over these past few days has led me on to hours of further reading and thinking.

I have to say, I found nearly all the poems in These Days unmoving, unenlightening, and unbearably light. That could just be me, of course – others may have a different experience. But then I came to the few final poems – “It’s a Wonderful Life”, “26”, “By My Skin” and a few others. Those poems had a depth that made me think that Flynn was writing more personally and more seriously about something that was important to her. Her love for her father comes to the fore, and, very powerfully, the changes in her life and perspective as she grows older (like the sea-change in “It’s a Wonderful Life”), literally ending in the final poem “These Days” with

These days I’m serious. These days I’m bowled over
Hearing myself say ten years ago this…ten years ago
such-and-such
Like the man left standing, his house falling wall by wall

These spoke to me, and made me wonder where she went with her poetry after this first book – so I plan to read another, perhaps her most recent The Radio, or Profit and Loss.

But it also got me to read three of Flynn’s essays – “Radically Necessary Heaney”, “What Do I Know?” and “Thanks for Sharing: Post-internet Poetry.” In these, she talks about the turning of her perspective, her growing appreciation of Seamus Heaney and why, and her concern about “a culture of speeded-up ephemerality, without a sense of scale or centre.” Now you’re talking.

This also got me to look a bit further into another Irish poet I am planning to read, Eavan Boland. And to read Boland’s great short essay about Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 1967. That essay in the Poetry Ireland Review asks the question “what happens when the objects of a literature become the authors of it?” A question for our times, surely. I’m looking forward to reading more of Boland, too.

[A.P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this several times now. It still seems as fresh. Flynn is a poet for whom I eagerly await her next collection.

[Rosamund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fresh and deceptively simple poems that draw on childhood and young adulthood. Quite personal. She loves words and what you can do with them.

[Lamia Muhammed · Rating 4 out of 5]

" Memories of childhood to the instabilities of adulthood" iLiked ...

[Luisa Estefania · Rating 3 out of 5]

First poetry book in years, particularly in English. Very accessible but powerful.

Would consider other books by the same author.

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sucker punch poems. Wonderful use of the English language.