Profit and Loss

(Paperback)

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The third collection from the prize-winning Irish poet. Celebrated as an unusually original poet - nervy, refreshing, deceptively simple - Leontia Flynn has quickly developed into a writer of assured technical complexity and a startling acuity of perception. In her third collection, Flynn examines and dismantles a fugitive life. The first sequence moves through a series of rooms, reflecting on aspects of the author's personal and family history. Using the idea of the haunted house or the house with a sealed-off room, and Gothic tropes of madness, doubles, revenants and religious brooding, the poems consider ideas of inheritance and legacy. The second section comprises a magnificent long poem written in the months leading up to the banking crisis and presidential election of October 2008. Taking as its occasion a flat-clearing, it assumes a more public voice (inspired partly by Auden's 'Letter to Lord Byron'), and reflects on aspects of the rapid social and technological change of the last decade. An extraordinarily moving reflection on mutability and mortality prompted by the spring-cleaning of a life's detritus, 'Letter to Friends' evolves from a private reliquary to a public obsequy. Its collapse back into private griefs, including the poet's father's decline into Alzheimer's disease, is pursued in the third section of the book. Here the theme of a tallying of private and public balance sheets, of different kinds of profit and loss, widens to include poems of motherhood and marriage, the possibilities of hope and repair.

Reviews

An outstanding Audenesque long poem, Letter to Friends makes this book essential reading, as it brilliantly captures the zeitgeist -- Sarah Wardle * Poetry Review *
My favourite book was Profit and Loss by Leontia Flynn, demonstrating her unrivalled capacity as a good-humoured but devastating observer of the modern secular scene. Letter to Friends, Flynns long poem about the way we live now, is a masterpiece. -- Bernard ODonoghue * TLS Books of the Year *
Flynns place as one of the strongest and most skilful poetic voices of her generation is confirmed in Profit and Loss [In Letter to Friends] like Auden, she addresses important issues here in a language that is both playful and serious, and in a form that is, if not large enough to swim in, at least robust enough to contain the many concerns she raises in it, from the delights and torments of personal and familial memory to the function and value of poetry in (postmodern) society. -- Philip Coleman * Irish Times *
A stunning third collection. Though shes the youngest poet on the T.S. Eliot shortlist, Flynn writes with a sharp-eyed almost fatalistic wisdom. Her striking 320-line poem in iambic pentameter Letter to Friends, could be described as a State of the Union address one that is highly personal but that takes stock of the larger world. It is this broad view that is one of her great strengths, as is her tone: sometimes earnest, sometimes irreverent, but invariably appealing. -- Kathryn Maris * Time Out *

Author Bio

Leontia Flynn was born in County Down in 1974. Her first book These Days (2004) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, and saw her named one of twenty 'Next Generation' poets by the Poetry Book Society. Her second collection, Drives, won the 2008 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her third collection, Profit and Loss, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She was awarded the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry in 2013 and the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award for 2014.