Days like these

“I remember when I was young, moping around the house, kind of depressed and my mum came up to me, put her arm around my shoulder and said: ‘Leontia love, it only gets worse’.”

You know that conclusion Philip Larkin drew about your mums and dads? Well, Leontia Flynn, the 29-year-old first-time author, giggling on the opposite side of the table, would like to disagree. These Days, the Newcastle writer’s sparkling debut poetry collection, is a book that can be read in many ways – as, for example, a faultless evocation of the lower case (or, as she says, “basic wage”) heartbreaks and epiphanies of young adulthood; or as a sly attempt to sneak determinedly domestic concerns under the imposing, barbed wire fence of Northern poetry. For my money, though, the book is approached most rewardingly as a fine exploration of both the damaging and recuperative power of love: love between friends, love between lovers, love between former lovers and, most remarkable of all, the love between parents and children. Take ‘Boys’ for example, where the mother worries that her room-bound daughter is missing out on life by fixating on records and books. Or ‘By My Skin’, which sees a father transform into “Captain Von Trapp, Jean Valijean, Professor Henry Higgins”, as he sings show tunes to distract his child from the application of anti-inflammatory skin cream. With its combination of fierce, lyrical, honesty and unforced tenderness, These Days acts as a powerful rebuttal of old Phil’s maxim: in this case it’s clear that mum and dad didn’t fuck anyone up.
“No, they didn’t,” Leontia agrees. “Which is disappointing because there’s nothing at all glamorous in having a functional family. I mean they are all actual lunatics. Absolute crazy people. The only reason we get on is because we all live apart from one another. It’s given me plenty of space to idealise them.”
Although only published in April, These Days already seems to have struck some kind of chord. Critical beatification has been conferred by Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson and Tom Paulin, while brisk sales have seen it eat stealthily through to its third print-run. Cause for celebration, you might think. However, for Flynn the exposure of such explicitly autobiographical (if artfully constructed) work to public scrutiny has not been without its problems.
“You write these things in a vacuum,” she explains, “never really imagining that anyone is going to see them. Then, next thing you know, the people that you’re writing about are going into a shop and buying a copy. It does make you question why on earth anyone would want to do this kind of thing? There’s something indecent in it. What am I, some kind of pervert? It has made me think about other approaches: Maeve McGuckian’s work would be suggestive and, if not coded, then maybe ambiguous – it isn’t hugely confessional. Then there’s public, political poetry – (thumping on the table) I am going to write about whatever is relevant! But I don’t think either approach would really suit me. I’m a total wreck. I’ve been completely unprepared for the whole thing.”
Which is a claim you can maybe take with a pinch of salt – because the publication of this book has hardly been a bolt from the blue. Leontia’s emergence has long been sign-posted. In 2001 she picked up a prestigious Eric Gregory Award alongside Zadie Smith, while her work has appeared in countless journals and anthologies over the last few years.
Equally predictable (if rather more depressing) has been the predilection, on the part of both publicists and reviewers, to interpret These Days through an explicitly Northern Irish prism.
“People insist on going on about how firmly situated the book is in the North but it isn’t at all. I wrote most of the poems in Edinburgh. I worked in an office and wrote tons, just because I had nothing else to do. It was either that or join my colleagues in slagging off asylum seekers. I think it’s because I mention the odd Belfast street name. It’s just a lazy and convenient tag to attach. But it’s one of the pains that comes with Irish literature – someone is always trying to write you into a tradition. It’s a hugely limiting idea.”
And limiting ideas are something that Leontia Flynn has little truck with. She chooses to end her collection with the poem that gives it its name – a rousing, statement of intent and display of hard-won confidence in the future.
“These days, like Cleopatra’s Anthony, I fancy bestriding the ocean;/these days I am serious.”