Taking Liberties - by Leontia Flynn (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A collection about motherhood at a time of continuous crisis - from one of Ireland's most important poets

'Everyone should be reading her'
OBSERVER

'One of the most accomplished poets of her generation'
GUARDIAN

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 that: 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.

Review Quotes

Anybody with an interest in poetry should be reading Leontia Flynn. Those with no interest should be reading her too she has what it takes to overcome resistance. All mothers - especially new mothers - should read her... Her thinking is complicated but never arrogantly inaccessible. I was bowled over--Observer

Flynn captures the tension between poetry as a personal impulse for freedom, and the human tethering to world events... A thought-provoking, calming response to this 'intricate, coping life'--Financial Times, *Books of the Year*

The real thing--Michael Longley, author of The Slain Birds

One of the most original and accomplished poets of her generation--Guardian

One of the most strikingly original and exciting poetic voices to have emerged from Northern Ireland since the extraordinary debut by Muldoon thirty-five years ago... She doesn't put a foot wrong on the page--Fran Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry

Surefooted and unsettling, Leontia Flynn's poems negotiate the cracks that lie below the surfaces of things. Reading them, we see the world differently--Ciaran Carson, author of Belfast Confetti

A poet who is not only one of the best writers of her generation but who seems, more and more, to be the voice of that generation--John McAuliffe, author of The Kabul Olympics

Makes clear what many people have known for the best part of two decades: she is one of the very best poets writing in Ireland in the twenty-first century. Taking Liberties is a consolidation of various strands of her poetic lives: musical without being conventional, funny without playing to the choir, scholarly without being exclusionary, dark without being morbid--Belfast Media

About the Author

Leontia Flynn has published four poetry collections. Her first book, These Days, won the Forward Prize for best first collection, and her most recent, The Radio (2017), won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Her other awards include an Eric Gregory Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Prize for Irish Literature, and the AWB Vincent Literary Award, and she has twice been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She is Reader in Poetry at Queen's University Belfast and was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.