Bringing It All Back Home

Poetry Chronicle #1.

by Terry Kelly

After a ridiculously long gap of 17 years, Tony Flynn has returned to the poetic fray with The Mermaid Chair – New and Selected Poems (Dream Catcher Books, 2008, £12). This generous 110pp selected will help reintroduce readers to a skilled and moving poet, who seemed to disappear from the literary radar following his first two collections, A Strange Routine and Body Politic, both published by Bloodaxe, in 1980 and 1992 respectively. But his latest work often surpasses his early poetry in quality and impact, making the long hiatus well worth the wait. Part of the Hull stable of poets in the late 1970s and early 80s, alongside Sean O’Brien, Peter Didsbury and others, Flynn’s work seemed to embody many of the poetic qualities showcased in Ian Hamilton’s The Review and later The New Review (his work, in fact, appeared in the latter). Following the example of poet, editor and literary hardliner Hamilton, Flynn’s poems were similarly short, intense lyrics of the ‘miraculous’ persuasion, often concerned with the climactic moments of human experience. While not afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve in its depiction of Catholic, working class experience, Flynn’s poetry was also shaped and controlled by what Roger Garfitt – referring to the work of another Review poet, David Harsent – called “a sensibility of quite arctic rigour.” But while Flynn fully understood the importance of poetic control, this was always tempered by a very human and humane sensibility:

Miles away you nurse
a small and
complicated head
against your breast.
All night
my mind is pounding trains
along the lines between us.
(’Separation’)

Reviewing his debut collection in Poetry Review in 1981, John Cassidy rightly said that Flynn’s writing was often concerned with “personal and family history, of remembered childhood, of separations, breakdowns and deaths.” In fact, introducing Flynn’s first pamphlet, Separations, all of 33 years ago, poet and literary mentor Douglas Dunn noted that the younger poet’s “meanings are almost always elicited through lyrical perceptions, through, in almost every case, a brush against the heart of the matter.” While Flynn’s second collection, Body Politic, displayed a much greater political, philosophical and historical amplitude, “revelations” and “the heart of the matter” still resonate throughout Flynn’s work. And while philosophers and writers from Abelard to Simone Weil inform Flynn’s later poetry, he remains intimately concerned with the simple but profound matters of the heart:

Somehow such joy
as makes love last
would get us through
the very worst
(’The Heart Itself’)

The poems in The Mermaid Chair are also concerned with the limits of language; with the power of the unsaid; with the shadowy resonances around the edges of language itself. But the poems continue to circle affairs of the heart and home, as a son’s concerns and perceptions dovetail with those of his mother (’Thaw’); as the observances of Ash Wednesday evoke a sharp memory of his father (’Catholics’); or as the poet’s own life enters an unexpected second act, with the birth of a new child. Tony Flynn’s literary absence has been protracted, but The Mermaid Chair should once again secure him a place in the front rank of British contemporary poets.