What do you think?
Rate this book
Taking Liberties
A collection about motherhood at a time of continuous crisis - from one of Ireland's most important poets
These poems emerge from the experience of being a single mother in Belfast, and against a background of seemingly continuous crisis. Political upheaval and anxiety, violence and death are all registered in these poems, which ask questions about where independence is balanced by our relationships with others, and where our inner lives meet the globally connected world.
These are poems about cities - living, travelling and working in cities, getting sick and dying in cities - but also about retreating from all to her daughter at home, the budgie, cat and tortoise, or escaping to the park, the municipal pool, the Irish countryside, Newfoundland, or Paris, or into a Nina Simone song.
This is a necessary book - a book very much of our time - with a consistent tone that is brave and bleak, but which also carries with it some much-needed humour, and a wealth of beautiful writing.
These poems emerge from the experience of being a single mother in Belfast, and against a background of seemingly continuous crisis. Political upheaval and anxiety, violence and death are all registered in these poems, which ask questions about where independence is balanced by our relationships with others, and where our inner lives meet the globally connected world.
These are poems about cities - living, travelling and working in cities, getting sick and dying in cities - but also about retreating from all to her daughter at home, the budgie, cat and tortoise, or escaping to the park, the municipal pool, the Irish countryside, Newfoundland, or Paris, or into a Nina Simone song.
This is a necessary book - a book very much of our time - with a consistent tone that is brave and bleak, but which also carries with it some much-needed humour, and a wealth of beautiful writing.
- GenresPoetry
61 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 24, 2023
About the author
Leontia Flynn
17 books10 followersLeontia 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.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 1, 2024
Leontia Flynn is one of my favourite Irish poets. Her work is deeply personal and often about the struggle to reconcile the self with the wider world. I suppose a lot of poetry is about that, but Flynn more than most perhaps can find novel, cute, funny, and deeply moving ways of expressing those tensions.
Taking Liberties is a collection that, for the most part, is about trying to find personal freedom in middle age. The very best poems are those that speak to the sense of freedom that is experienced by spending time away from one's own child, of stretching that umbilicus between them, as she has it in 'In arts centres', and the guilt that the freedom gained is inevitably mired in. There are other small freedoms that come with menopause and age, it seems, but they are always shadowed by unfreedoms too and some form of loss. Freedom, Flynn seems to argue throughout, is about painful loss as much as it is about gain.
I was thinking of describing this as a mature collection of Flynn's work, but that might imply that her other work was anything other than mature. This would be untrue, because each of the previous four collections is deeply mature in its composition and themes. But what I think I am getting at here is that Flynn is describing a maturity of age very perfectly. It is not, it seems, easy to reconcile oneself with middle age and yet there are many benefits of it, such as caring less about certain surface level details of life and oneself. However, there is always the tension of what is lost too. The final poems 'Summer is fading' capture this sense of change and age perfectly and are probably the finest in the collection.
Where the poems made less of an impression upon me was where they focused on the US and Canada. Some of these work well, when we have clear sense of Flynn herself in these environs, but those imagining the perspective of a parent of a child killed at Uvalde and a heady poem about public consciousness in the US, 'All the people', were somewhat less convincing. There is talent in the composition, but there does seem to be an lack of depth to them.
For me, I still find that each of Flynn's collections, great as they are, stand in the shadow of her first, These Days. That early collection painted the sense of growing up and stretching from Belfast so perfectly and with such wit and eloquence that I don't think it could be surpassed. That said, Taking Liberties is a very fine collection indeed and well worth a read.
Taking Liberties is a collection that, for the most part, is about trying to find personal freedom in middle age. The very best poems are those that speak to the sense of freedom that is experienced by spending time away from one's own child, of stretching that umbilicus between them, as she has it in 'In arts centres', and the guilt that the freedom gained is inevitably mired in. There are other small freedoms that come with menopause and age, it seems, but they are always shadowed by unfreedoms too and some form of loss. Freedom, Flynn seems to argue throughout, is about painful loss as much as it is about gain.
I was thinking of describing this as a mature collection of Flynn's work, but that might imply that her other work was anything other than mature. This would be untrue, because each of the previous four collections is deeply mature in its composition and themes. But what I think I am getting at here is that Flynn is describing a maturity of age very perfectly. It is not, it seems, easy to reconcile oneself with middle age and yet there are many benefits of it, such as caring less about certain surface level details of life and oneself. However, there is always the tension of what is lost too. The final poems 'Summer is fading' capture this sense of change and age perfectly and are probably the finest in the collection.
Where the poems made less of an impression upon me was where they focused on the US and Canada. Some of these work well, when we have clear sense of Flynn herself in these environs, but those imagining the perspective of a parent of a child killed at Uvalde and a heady poem about public consciousness in the US, 'All the people', were somewhat less convincing. There is talent in the composition, but there does seem to be an lack of depth to them.
For me, I still find that each of Flynn's collections, great as they are, stand in the shadow of her first, These Days. That early collection painted the sense of growing up and stretching from Belfast so perfectly and with such wit and eloquence that I don't think it could be surpassed. That said, Taking Liberties is a very fine collection indeed and well worth a read.
October 21, 2023
When a poetry collection starts off with quotes by both Chaucer and Vladimir Putin, ye know you’re in for a good time.
November 19, 2023
Another engaging anthology. Neither blandly drifting towards wellness therapy, nor so cryptic that its potency is beyond code-cracking lit crit, these poems reward in so many ways. Thank you.
May 29, 2024
REVIEW COMING.
September 23, 2023
I love Flynn's style - the way she can apply precise, unconventional language in an otherwise quotidian register - and I love her way of approaching a subject as a study, zooming in on it until it becomes larger than itself, releasing the philosophy within. Thus worked so well in her pamphlet of Catullus poems (Slim New Book) and remains strong here, though the filthy humour of Catullus is now the drier, more mordant wit of Flynn's own.
She's at it from the off here, observing those in suburan houses "suffering / the full Madame Bovary... in heritage / coordinated tones"; exploring not the highs and lows of motherhood but the piercing particularities if it (the family home being a "hot crucible of love / and self-annihilation") and the conflict of trying to retain a self while the love of a child, and the material realities of parenting, change that self irrevocably. We've seen some great writing on motherhood over the last few years, but I think Flynn is particularly special in how aware she is that the child's own self is affected by this too ("daughter - born of my flesh, / and my finite economy / of energy and patience").
The poems here can be loosely grouped: there are the 'on' or 'at' poems, where a location becomes one among many ('In public squares', 'At motorway service stations', 'On platforms') and Flynn takes a sort of existential bird's-eye view of the shared experiences had in these places; there are the 'study' poems, where an object (tortoise, houseplant, etc) comes under scrutiny, and the poem's line is drawn by the tension between what the object is alone and what it represents for the voice observing it; then there are the longer, either sequence-based or narrative poems - my favourite of these is 'Nina Simone is Singing', in which Flynn uses a moment in Simone's music to cast a vision of her younger self hearing it, exploring that self's state of mind and delusions, and then somehow looking through that person into the passage of time - experience she has had and her younger self is yet to comprehend - before rising up into Simone's own life and art.
Motherhood is important in these poems ('In classrooms and science labs' uses in places the words of Kimberley Rubio after the Uvalde shootings) and particularly the artist's attempts to write and parent, though I think Flynn balances this so that writing is always her example of this problem - she's clear that this is about her example of the need for solitude and focus ("the anchorite in her cell and desert hermit") rather than the writer-artist's suffering being any more special than that of others.
I think this is Flynn's fifth collection now, or sixth if the Catullus book counts, and me it's her strongest to date, displacing 'Profit and Loss'. That was another book about being on the brink of one of adulthood's many stages, and she's there again, differently, now.
She's at it from the off here, observing those in suburan houses "suffering / the full Madame Bovary... in heritage / coordinated tones"; exploring not the highs and lows of motherhood but the piercing particularities if it (the family home being a "hot crucible of love / and self-annihilation") and the conflict of trying to retain a self while the love of a child, and the material realities of parenting, change that self irrevocably. We've seen some great writing on motherhood over the last few years, but I think Flynn is particularly special in how aware she is that the child's own self is affected by this too ("daughter - born of my flesh, / and my finite economy / of energy and patience").
The poems here can be loosely grouped: there are the 'on' or 'at' poems, where a location becomes one among many ('In public squares', 'At motorway service stations', 'On platforms') and Flynn takes a sort of existential bird's-eye view of the shared experiences had in these places; there are the 'study' poems, where an object (tortoise, houseplant, etc) comes under scrutiny, and the poem's line is drawn by the tension between what the object is alone and what it represents for the voice observing it; then there are the longer, either sequence-based or narrative poems - my favourite of these is 'Nina Simone is Singing', in which Flynn uses a moment in Simone's music to cast a vision of her younger self hearing it, exploring that self's state of mind and delusions, and then somehow looking through that person into the passage of time - experience she has had and her younger self is yet to comprehend - before rising up into Simone's own life and art.
Motherhood is important in these poems ('In classrooms and science labs' uses in places the words of Kimberley Rubio after the Uvalde shootings) and particularly the artist's attempts to write and parent, though I think Flynn balances this so that writing is always her example of this problem - she's clear that this is about her example of the need for solitude and focus ("the anchorite in her cell and desert hermit") rather than the writer-artist's suffering being any more special than that of others.
I think this is Flynn's fifth collection now, or sixth if the Catullus book counts, and me it's her strongest to date, displacing 'Profit and Loss'. That was another book about being on the brink of one of adulthood's many stages, and she's there again, differently, now.
January 4, 2024
“Set down this cup.
Oh drink not from this glass,
young, irrepressibly
thirsty former self!
For what you call solitude
is a yawning mouth
into which might drop
quarters, lengths, fathoms.”
A tender, introspective collection of poetry. Some poems grabbed me more than others but that is always the case with collections, especially well-curated ones. Flynn is a talented poet and I look forward to what she creates next.
3.5 stars rounded up ⭐️
Oh drink not from this glass,
young, irrepressibly
thirsty former self!
For what you call solitude
is a yawning mouth
into which might drop
quarters, lengths, fathoms.”
A tender, introspective collection of poetry. Some poems grabbed me more than others but that is always the case with collections, especially well-curated ones. Flynn is a talented poet and I look forward to what she creates next.
3.5 stars rounded up ⭐️
November 7, 2023
poetry that captures glimmers of hope in the hopeless!!
February 16, 2024
Always stunning. One of our greatest poets
May 21, 2025
My second owned scollection of Flynn’s after the excellent The Radio (2017). This book did not disappoint and captured again perfectly moments of tensions and release. Here is a collection that dwells on the thresholds of uncertainty- often overshadowed by constant danger as well as the pressures of adult life as a mother and as a woman. Flynn has an entirely unique way of seeing the world and has the ability to find dazzling metaphors both complex and surprisingly simple, even humorously, setting scenes then providing personal glimpses into the speakers lives- rivh and by turns historical. Flynn remains multitalented through both the longer and shorter form (the short opening ‘At Every Stage’ setting the tone amidst a backdrop of political upheaval), who’s writing is surely some of the best poetry being written today - do read- and return as I surely will. So many favourites- including ‘Now that the verdict’s in’, ‘In her Silent Cloister’, ‘Mid-term in Belfast’ , ‘Dickinson in Amherst’, ‘Summer is Fading’ and ‘The Small Boat had Turned’
From ‘The Footage from the Drone’
‘The fires poetry tore
through the buildings prose
Like time
Through eternity’
From ‘The Footage from the Drone’
‘The fires poetry tore
through the buildings prose
Like time
Through eternity’
Read
February 6, 2024delicate
November 28, 2024
So smart too clever for me
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews