Vroom at the Top

“I’d say that learning to drive was more nerve-wrecking than giving birth.”

Note that Leontia Flynn is laughing when she makes this claim (and that Minnie, her young daughter, is safely out of earshot); but note too that she’s not laughing that much. That, in fact, we’re actually inclined to take her at her word.
“You’ve no idea how poor my spatial skills are,” she continues. “I mean, the fine mechanics were a doddle – reversing, emergency stops, three point turns. But trying to manoeuvre the thing through the world is where the problems arose. I’ve no sense of direction – can’t turn into a lane, just can’t. I’ve always been like that. I walk around like a stick being dragged through water – my memory leaves no trace of where I’ve just been. It’s spatial dyslexia really. I was so worried about it at 18 that I was tempted to go on an orienteering course. But then I realised I’d probably be the world’s oldest scout. So, passing my test was actually a miraculous achievement. Although I can only drive in straight lines and turn left.”
Flynn’s second collection of poetry is entitled Drives – and if she was half as assured behind a wheel as she is navigating around the nuances and subtleties of her work, we would be looking at Ireland’s first Formula One champion.
Drives is a book of cars, planes and destinations. Of internal and external journeys. Of anxious passengers and distracted pilots.
“I don’t want to labour the significance of the title,” she says, “but I do tend to find one central idea and exploit different notions of it to the point of exhaustion. So, it was another way of trying to find out what makes people tick – sex drives, death drives.”
The last time Leontia appeared on this page she told a porkie.
Talking about her prize-winning debut collection, These Days – a book championed noisily by the likes of Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley and Tom Paulin – and the autobiographical bent of many of its finest poems, she stated that never again would she publish work of such a personal hue. A single encounter with Drives shows that not to be the case. So what happened?
“Looking back now, I don’t think the last one was actually all that revealing. Or, maybe, it would have been if more than twenty people read it. But no one really gives a shit. Which is actually quite a liberating realisation. I was a bit cagey about the last one, and a bit fretful over how the people some of the poems were about would react, but I needn’t have worried. Of course, before you’re published you imagine you’ll find your ideal reader and they’ll send you eighty pages of informed responses. But I’m still waiting on it arriving in the post. So, I didn’t have that kind of anxiety this time.”
Which is just as well. If These Days dealt in the kind of “basic-wage, take-what-you-get epiphany” of young adulthood – that first job, that first relationship, that first break-up – the more explicitly personal poems in Drives concern themselves with subjects familiar to anyone moving onto the next stage: pregnancy, motherhood, the aging of parents. It’s a powerful, tender and enormously poignant collection.
“I suppose I was aware of the concerns changing,” she admits. “In some of the poems I was trying to keep up the impression of a certain autobiographical persona which picked up where the other collection left off. The poems towards the end of the book, yes, come out of an older person’s experiences of family. I was aware that me and my friends are at a stage where our fathers often seem to be ill, or indeed dying. The final poem was written for my sister when she was pregnant, as a request, because she asked me to be godmother.”
In ‘Poem For An Unborn Child’, she wishes her young nephew “to be daunted, steadfast – yes – alert/and to swim (in a style of your choosing) to the heart/of undull life, that you are magicked to.”
Leontia Flynn may not be the person to get you to the airport in time, but you really couldn’t hope for a better back-seat driver.

Drives is published by Cape Poetry