I literally can't stop reading her at the moment, and her most recent collection - Drives. The collection is direct and assured in its voice: there are many poems based on the premise of writing from a distance, a 'drive', interspersed with portraits of famous writers (Bishop, Lowell, Becket), cities and transient locations or actions ('Airports' for example, or 'Sylvia Plath's Sinus Condition' which 'might prove as sudden/ as the thought to drive at high speed off the road').
Whether the poems are biographical, autobiographical, or unspecifically addressed to person or place, there is a continual sense of the act of writing to someone or something, from a distance, which is reminiscent of Hugo Williams' Writing Home, but with a fuller, more broad sense of the world. It is as though by focusing on the recipient of the letter rather than the writer, a space is left for the reader to be invited into the wider concept: 'now you are/ burning your bridges, and you are leaving Belfast/ to its own devices: it will rise and fall/ it will bury its past...become the place it seemed before you lived there'. Not that the reader is exiled in Williams' engulfing domestic setting at all... perhaps I should let the poetry speak for itself. Here is one of my favourites:
Personality
'Poetry', you are saying, 'is nothing but personality...'
and I look out onto the row upon row of grey hills
and light striking the rooftops, and just at this moment
there isn't much in my life I'd miss if it were over:
the weird and cheerful meannes of people to each other,
about pay, status, odd grudges, responsibility;
work's meaningless - but its opposite, leasure's abyss!
a snake coiled in the chest morning after morning...
How do I cope when poetry is part of this bullshit?
Part of this racket? What you call 'personality'
seems something heroic; it seems the rictus grin
on a student's practice corpse - that breaths iambically
between each line, with their knives parting the skin,
'love me, love me, love me, love me, love me...'
Flynn lives in Belfast where she is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University. Upon recently researching this degree, I also learnt that she runs an entire course on Paul Muldoon. Awesome.