Selected Poems

Poems and translations from two decades of writing, exploring in restless, evolving forms, the experiment of being alive in a changing and turbulent world. Leontia Flynn is one of the key poets of her generation. This first selection of her work reveals how her poetry, so often pained, funny, and heartfelt, also describes a life lived in the first quarter of the twenty-first century with unmistakable freshness and vivid clarity. Flynn brings dark humour and tenderness to her characteristic subjects: childhood inheritance, the North of Ireland and its history, physical fragility, mothers and single motherhood, love and loss. Bringing together work from her five previous collections, this Selected Poems, in its variety of forms, registers the trajectory of a life: the awful and exhilarating experiment of existing in a turbulent world.