The dedication in Paul Muldoon’s first collection, New Weather (1973) reads: ‘for my Fathers and Mothers’. It’s a typically mischievous phrase which acknowledges not only his real father and mother, but also those literary forebears, precursors, mentors, and tutors, who bear some responsibility for the gestation of the poet-Muldoon – Seamus Heaney, the Longleys, Michael Allen most immediately and obviously, not to mention Robert Frost, Louis MacNeice, and others in the literary tradition through which he truffles so productively. On the one hand a gracious tribute, on the other the dedication is also a self-assertion of Muldoon as the enfant terrible who will, with wonderful arrogance, tell ‘new weather’ from ‘broken bones’.

There is a precedent here for Leontia Flynn, and in more ways than one. Flynn’s is one of the most strikingly original and exciting poetic voices to have emerged from Northern Ireland since the extraordinary debut by Muldoon 35 years ago. Like Muldoon, she appeared on the scene in her first collection, These Days (2004) as something of, as she puts it in the opening poem ‘Naming It’, a ‘marauding child’ out to discover something new, who might be ‘preachy / with booklearning’ but certainly won’t be preached at, and whose iconoclasm (Alan Gillis has something of this quality too) is refreshing in a Northern Irish poetic tradition at risk of taking itself as seriously as it has been taken by its critics. There is a different kind of risk, therefore, for Flynn in her debut collection too. At first glance, some of the poems seem throw-away, off-hand, brief jottings on the page rather than fully realised poetic achievement. Yet the assurance and skill required to hide those same qualities of assurance and skill is also what gives the ten-line seemingly ephemeral and anecdotal poems scattered across These Days their depth and originality. In a reversal of strategies adopted by one of her immediate precursors Medbh McGuckian, Flynn makes it seem easy, which, for her readers, can also make it that little bit harder to grasp what she is about.

In that sense, her second collection Drives is a more immediately comprehensible achievement, its formal complexities no longer playing hide and seek with the reader, but announcing themselves in full dress. Flynn compulsively writes sonnet after sonnet – sometimes conventional ones, sometimes experimental, and constituting almost half the poems in the book. (It’s a compulsion characteristic of Muldoon too, a third of whose oeuvre to date consists of sonnets and sonnet-sequences.) They are sonnets about mothers and fathers, of the actual and literary kind. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, Larkin (one of Flynn’s early crushes) famously wrote, a comment which is perhaps particularly prescient as regards literary mothers and fathers in the Irish tradition. Flynn is not alone among her peers in exhibiting both an admiration of, and tendency to react against, the celebrated older generations of Northern Irish poets. In her first collection, this manifests itself in the affectionate irreverence of ‘When I was Sixteen I met Seamus Heaney’ (‘I believe’ she concludes the poem, ‘he signed my bus ticket, which I later lost’). There are also some side-swipes at, as well as borrowings from, a literary tradition from Chaucer to Wordsworth, Flynn’s casual allusiveness free of pretension.

In Drives the second stanza of Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’ seems to hold good too: ‘But they were fucked up in their turn’. Here are just a few of the figures who drive Flynn’s sonneteering through the book: Charles Baudelaire, Dorothy Parker, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath. Poetically strong some of them may be; well-adjusted they are not – or certainly not as they appear in these pages. The ‘Drives’ of the title refer to journeys and homecomings; they are also the things which drive us, suicidal or sexual urges, compulsions (like the one to write poems perhaps) not entirely healthy and not always understood. Beckett, Baudelaire, psychoanalysis and mothers offer one variation on this theme; Howard Hughes, his mother, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (and OCD is also a preoccupation of Flynn’s first collection) another. There’s a knowing play on this even in Flynn’s own recurrent use of the sonnet. ‘I just kept repeating them ’, she said in an interview recently. ‘I have to stop that now’. Beckett ‘dreams of suffocation, / palpitations, panic attacks’; ‘Olive Schriener ‘will suffer from asthma’; in Elizabeth Bishop’s art of losing (linked here to Plath’s art of dying) ‘She even loses her breath’; and in ‘Marcel Proust’ a ‘melancholic asthma’ is linked to the speaker’s anhedonia – all of which obliquely tracks back to ‘Acts of Faith’ and the poet’s 24th birthday in These Days, where her ‘lungs close over’ and her ‘mother brings…Prednisone’.

These are all, in different ways, figures who prove liberating for the poet, (influences also evident in the work of Nick Laird and Alan Gillis), and it’s notable that so many are from the American tradition, an asthmatic and transatlantic breath of fresh air. It seems, too, that the problems they suffered ‘in their turn’ and in some cases the accompanying confessional impulses are what help to unleash Flynn’s own voice. In Drives she treads personal, sometimes painful ground, too astute not to be aware of her own entrapment in an art versus life dilemma, or of her own self-absorption. ‘Personality’ asks what can survive the student knives ‘parting the skin’ on the ‘practice corpse’ of a poem, and the personality which ‘breathes iambically’ at the end ‘“love me, love me, love me…”’ is reminiscent of the close of Plath’s The Bell Jar where Esther listens to ‘the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am’. (Plath is the single most recurrent figure in Flynn’s writings to date.) In ‘Robert Lowell’, Flynn writes ‘imagine using those letters in his sonnets? / Using and re-using / the fact of pain – as thought pain were a poem’. But as she writes ‘imagine,’ she also imagines, and the poem must of necessity collude in what it seems to decry. Appropriately, ‘Robert Lowell’ is a double sonnet, the first, on the whole, conventionally Shakespearean, the second a mirror image, a mimicking of its own subject. Rhymed abcd abcd efg efg the poem, like the poet, gets two goes at it, ‘revising and revising…the living details of a living life’; ‘story’ and ‘art’ chime with ‘journey’ and ‘heart’.

Drives, as we might expect from its title, is a book of journeys. Two early poems, ‘Belfast’ and ‘Leaving Belfast’ are points of departure for a whistlestop tour of ‘budget destination[s]’ (‘The Human Fish’): we are whisked through ‘Monaco’, ‘Barcelona’, ‘Rome’, Copenhagen, ‘Paris’, ‘Berlin’, ‘LA’, ‘Washington’, ‘New York’. There’s a mini-parable here for Flynn’s reaching out from her home ground (the MacNeicean debt acknowledged in ‘Belfast’) to the big wide world. Fortunately, for those perhaps weary of poets journeying to interesting places for interesting cross-cultural encounters resulting (theoretically at least) in interesting poems, these individualist and quirky meanderings are short, sharp, perceptive and self-aware. Yet although they proliferate, the travel poems are not where the real discoveries of this book are found. Rather, the journey underlying the book’s development is a more personal and painful one relating to the poet’s father. As the pages of poems accumulate, they stand in contrast to the gradual erosion of her father’s memory in ‘A Head for Figures’:

And where have they gone, the rest of those rustling facts?
They have fallen from his head like cerements.
They have slipped through his fingers,
they have slipped from his big kind hands.

In effect, as the ‘rustling facts’ slip away from her father, Flynn finds her own ‘art of losing’. It has its clever intertextualities, its linguistic and formal sleights-of-hand, but Drives goes beyond its own self-consciousness to probe the nature of loss and gain, learning and unlearning. What might seem like theoretical issues and questions about language and ‘personality’ are also the private emotional core of the book. In the sestina ‘Drive’, the word ‘sign’ is progressively evacuated of meaning through its end-line repetitions as words become, for her father: ‘empty signs, / now one name means as little as another’. In ‘Our Fathers’, signs are ‘braille / or a trail // of breadcrumbs / or rosary beads…by which…we seek to delay / them, our fathers’:

thinking – heh heh – if we can trap
them,
then we can keep
them,

and if we can keep them

we’ll keep them … forever!

But the signs don’t work, the words themselves can’t contain meaning, and the father figure slips through the lines of the poem. This art of losing is hard to master; and the delicate, elusive simplicity of these lines captures what it also lets go. If Flynn is wrong-footed by her father’s illness, attempting the impossible, she doesn’t put a foot wrong on the page:

But my father
my father

my father holds open
the door of himself
and lets his old ghost
pass through

before him
(‘after you, after you’
he mouths): his guest,
– his old self – stealth

-ily tip
-toeing out (Shhh)…

Leontia Flynn, Drives, Jonathan Cape, 2008. £9. ISBN 978-0-224-08517-5

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