D. A. Prince reviews Taking Liberties by Leontia Flynn (Cape, 2024)
When Leontia Flynn’s pamphlet Nina Simone is Singing (Mariscat, 2021) was short-listed for the Michael Marks award, the judges described her as “one of the finest chroniclers of our neurotic inner world”. Yes: that ties in with my reading of her earlier collections. The fourteen poems in that pamphlet have now grown into Taking Liberties, and while the pressures in the outer world have not reduced, Flynn can, for the moment – and only in the final poems – find some source of respite and relief. This is her fifth collection: her previous book (The Radio, Cape) came out in 2017. She is a poet who allows space between each publication: she assimilates and reflects, not only on herself but on how politics, violence, and the manifold changes in the world impact on life for a single woman, now and in Northern Ireland. Cape describes her as “necessary”. I agree.
In Taking Liberties is Flynn exploring some sort of anchor for herself and her poetry? Riffle through the pages for a quick look and the visual impression is of quatrains, shortish lines, plenty of white space. It’s as though the poems are neatly folded, stacked as you might tidy a cupboard when you need some reassurance. Remember how some people reacted to the first months of Covid by creating order around themselves? The appearance of a collection works on a reader’s perception even before we start reading.
Cape describes her as “necessary”. I agree
Yet these quatrains aren’t quite as neat or settled as they look. Frequently the final line of a stanza isn’t end-stopped but runs on, freely, into the next as though searching for some resolution. ‘On platforms and in plate-glass waiting rooms’, a three-section poem, opens:
On platforms and in plate-glass
waiting rooms, people are pressing
towards the sliding doors.
The rails stretch out
before them into the future.
Everything streams
from the station’s loaded bow.
It is early morning in late August [brittle light].
It reads like directions for a film, setting the scene for departure; it could be the rail-tracks on the cover photograph. Those “people” are separate, distant, with no connection to the poet. Flynn lives in Belfast and knows how disconnected city life can be: aspects of that fragmented solitude link these poems. Modern life, observed in the second section from a high window, divides as much as it joins. Watching cumulo nimbus in the early dawn she conflates it with that other cloud, her data-self:
as I leaned
out the window —
its timeline and sidebar
passing above the trees
with my credit, data, genome and algorithm.
With my passcode, thumbprint, content and preferences —
It’s how we exist these days, the essence of being a functioning human in impersonal cyberspace. In the third section the “people” have become “women” and “Their journeys stretch // before them to the border. / One border is The Loved One. / Another, middle age.” There are a lot of borders in these poems, bringing with them the inescapable shadows of Irish history, along with the borders within the individual – between the past and present self, between one person and another. She sees boundaries, barriers, thresholds (physical as well as emotional and psychological), aware of how they intensify the much-needed safety of what home offers:
Dickinson in Amherst. Montagne in the Dordogne.
Yayoi Kusama in her asylum in Tokyo.
Now each of us flees inside to their cave or refuge,
to the ‘house that protects the dreamer’, the citadel.
(from ‘Dickinson in Amherst’)
Flynn quotes here from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (a google journey worth taking) on the necessity for solitude and a private place for dreaming. The poem narrows its focus from the international set of writers/artists referenced in the first half to the only necessary “intimacy”, namely that between herself and her daughter. She isn’t a poet who foregrounds her own life-history but there’s just enough across these pages to point to the end of a relationship. We see it first at the end of in ‘It is solstice in the city’:
I scan each surface
for the remnants of my Gross Domestic Product.
One sock. A half-read book.
This child’s plastic volcano —
its small dome cooling
after the explosion.
Not much, I agree, but enough of an alert. So, arriving at ‘Nina Simone is singing’ – and her song is In My Solitude – we’re ready to map Flynn’s domestic setting. The poem plays across two dates – 1999 (just before “the bugged millennium”) and today – with Flynn’s younger self and her current self both listening to the same song. It’s a thread of continuity, except that in 1999 Flynn was “playing at solitude” in a new city, not knowing her future:
And the loves of the future
advance towards you
extending their rhizomes;
connections forged
across the synaptic gap
as neuron seeks neuron
Her younger self thought it was solitary; her now-self knows more about being alone “in the singular world / that is untransfigured by love.” The song, with its extended rendering of “sol—it—uuuuuude” winds through the poem.
But there’s something else going on in this collection. If you’re accustomed going to poetry workshops you’ll be all too familiar with some current fashions around titles. There’s the advice about choosing an attention-grabbing zany title if you want to attraction an editor’s attention. Then, starting the poem by making the title the first line so that the poem flows onwards from it. You’ll be familiar with the “helpful” comments your fellow poets make if you happen to repeat the title, the way they pile in. Shock, horror! So the received wisdom is: do not repeat the title.
In Taking Liberties each poem’s title is the same as its first line, or even the first two lines: exactly the same. (There are five exceptions but they’re for later.) You might like to pause to take this in. I had to do just that when I’d noticed a first example, then another – then checked obsessively, poems and contents page, to make sure. A couple of examples:
The footage from the drone
afterward
showed the charred
interior walls
(from ‘The footage from the drone’)
It is solstice in the city.
The gulls are flying — high
into pale infinitesimal light.
(from ‘It is solstice in the city’)
They’re not flashy attention-grabbers either, these titles: you might even call them boring. However, much of daily life has the same mundane routine, where our average moments are spent keeping our heads down, just getting through. And they are exactly right in the context of this collection. Four exceptions sit together, all fourteen-liners: ‘Tortoise Poem; ‘Budgie Poem’; ‘Cat Poem’; ‘Houseplant Poem’. The sort of working title you might give a draft so that you could locate it later in your computer files. Or, in Flynn’s case, a set of titles that are domestic, interior, comforting and safe, and which take me back to the lines above from ‘Dickinson in Amherst’. What looks self-effacing is taking liberties with current title-formats.
It’s not only in the titling that Flynn takes liberties. The realities of travel, flight, escape are all ideas that flicker in and out of the poems …
It’s not only in the titling that Flynn takes liberties. The realities of travel, flight, escape are all ideas that flicker in and out of the poems until they settle, or sort-of-settle, in ‘All of the people’. This is the fifth exception to title / first line pattern. Eight six-line stanzas, laced with rollicking colloquial repetition – or, to quote from the third stanza, “When I break my arm by falling on the sidewalk / words break too. They switch like a bad sestina.” The final two lines of each stanza, indented like a chorus, is a variation on
And all of the people say Yeah, no — Hey wait, what?
I eat clean but train dirty. That’s perfection. We rank and yank.
A handful of contemporary mantras, a mix of muddled New York management-speak and life-style guru-speak; it’s city life played over and over. Single lines re-appear with tiny variations. For example, the opening line “Dense clouds of starlings ripple on our skylines” pops up again in the penultimate stanza. The poem ends in considering “loneliness” but gives it a bit of uplift:
I never felt more totally alone
than slumped by the gate in the airport departure lounge.
Dense clouds of starlings ripple on the skyline.
Or more nearly okay, too, with being so alone.
Finally, two poems with the same title: ‘Summer is fading’, a line picked up from ‘On platforms and in plate-glass waiting rooms’. Repeated titles? Your “helpful” fellow poets in that workshop would be weeping with despair, throwing your work back at you if you tried to get this across. Yet how satisfying it is here, both for the reader and for a resolution of Flynn’s restlessness and loneliness:
Summer is fading.
These mornings planes fly
once more over the city.
The skylight frames them like stamps
above where the house
narrows on its foundations.
My storeys are settled.
My tall walls creak in the heat.
Like that skylight, the consistent first line / title repetition has given a framework to the collection, something to hold tight to, a way of staying safe when everything is unstable. The final poem – four-line stanzas again but with longer, relaxed lines – reflects this. It’s a mix of natural world and urban “grey, brutalist concrete”, with ivy and bindweed, the crows and magpies and gulls. Ordinary stuff along the banks of the (unnamed) river Langan. The third stanza opens “No one would call it beautiful, this city’s river” but then the following stanza expands:
No one would call it beautiful but this morning it is beautiful
when the sunlight rests its arm on the gull-covered water,
and the dog-daisies and the orchids, wild in the banks,
are prettier for being overgrown.
Flynn watches every word (not “on” the banks, but “in”). The plants are rooted, safe and protected. This collection has earned its hard-won moment of peace, although her attention to language and the workings of poems (individually and collectively) have a trajectory beyond the final poem. It’s this aspect that stays with me: how her poetry is searching for a way of living, how much the precision of her poetry matters.
D. A. Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her second collection, Common Ground (HappenStance, 2014), won the East Midlands Book Award 2015. Her most recent collection, The Bigger Picture (also from HappenStance) was published in 2022.