The Radio
Leontia Flynn
2017 • Jonathan Cape
Actually, where my poems in The Radio are definitely dark is in thinking of what it must have been like for my own mother to raise five kids during a time of violence in Northern Ireland—given that it’s hard on the nerves as it is. I actually heard the anecdote about women from West Belfast queuing up for weekly prescriptions of Valium from someone else, and I thought ‘well of course they were…’ So I put that in the title poem.
— Leontia Flynn
The Radio
Leontia Flynn
2017 • Jonathan Cape
Actually, where my poems in The Radio are definitely dark is in thinking of what it must have been like for my own mother to raise five kids during a time of violence in Northern Ireland—given that it’s hard on the nerves as it is. I actually heard the anecdote about women from West Belfast queuing up for weekly prescriptions of Valium from someone else, and I thought ‘well of course they were…’ So I put that in the title poem.
— Leontia Flynn
Description
In her fourth collection, Leontia Flynn rehearses and resolves the concerns and forms of previous books, beginning with a sequence written in the aftermath of her father’s death from Alzheimer’s disease and during the care of her daughter in infancy. Moving on to explore the constructed nature of childhood, via a long poem imagining her mother’s experiences in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and in an elegy for Seamus Heaney, the poems also seek to contrast the isolation and privacy of an experience of family life with increasingly pervasive and relentless digital technologies. Drawing on a range of other voices and literary exemplars, including a tradition of verse drama and dialogues, and particularly Plath’s ‘Three Women’, The Radio sees writing poems as a communication that begins with an act of interior listening, for sounds and forms, and to personal sources of meaning.
Excerpts
Interviews
- WFU Press: Radio Signals – An Interview with Leontia Flynn
- Culture Northern Ireland: My Cultural Life – Leontia Flynn
Prizes & Awards
Reviews
- Kate Kellaway, The Observer
- Sarah Warren, World Literature Today
- Taidgh Lynch, River Volta Review
- John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
- The College Review
Audio
- T.S. Eliot Prize: Leontia Flynn Reads From The Radio
- Poetry Jukebox Quotidian: Leontia Flynn – The Radio (Excerpt)
Video
- T.S. Eliot Prize: Leontia Flynn Talks About her Work
- T.S. Eliot Prize: Leontia Flynn Reads ‘The Fish in the Berlin Aquarium’
- T.S. Eliot: Leontia Flynn Reads ‘Yellow Lullaby’
- T.S. Eliot: Leontia Flynn Reads ‘Poem in Homage to Built Things in Three Dimensions’
