The Radio

Leontia Flynn

• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781943666195
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

In  The Radio, Leontia Flynn exercises her signature wit, formal inventiveness, bitter irony, and unique blend of vernacular speech and literary allusion. In the title poem, the radio is a portal from the outside world, piping "explosive news" of the Northern Irish Troubles into the poet's childhood home, her mother constantly turning to "field the blow" from her children's ears. The first two sections, "The Child, the Family…" followed by "…And the Outside World," are titled after the classic book on child development by D.W. Winnicott. These poems relentlessly test the boundaries of home and family life as the poet remembers childhood scenes, mentors such as Seamus Heaney, old loves and friends, and the heightened moments of the past. The final section contains three dialogues: a low-flying strafe across the fields of gender politics; a climate change debate between a defender of the industrial abuse of nature for the good of man and the responding voice of nature itself; and a satire writ between a weary mother of grown children and the Awesome Voice of the Internet. This is a volume about transmissions that sometimes assault us and sometimes help us escape, signals breaking through from outside in, from past to present, from parents to children. As the "glazed God's-eye / of the transmitter" keeps watch over home, the city, and the "fanciful list" of people who inhabit these spaces, we are made aware, and made wary, of the constant intrusion of technology and the broader concerns of the world. These formally inventive and superbly controlled poems balance Flynn's trenchant observations with a deeply sympathetic understanding of her subject.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Start
• The Child, the Family…
• In the Beginning
• Yellow Lullaby
• Alzheimer’s Villanelle
• The Brunties: An Elegy
• Poem in Praise of Hysterical Men and Women
• Bobby Fischer: Very Displaced Elegy
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• The Radio
• Listening to my Mother Listen to the Radio
• The Radio
• …and the Outside World
• August 30th 2013
• Field of Yellow Flowers with Airplane and Standing Figure: Poem for Gavin Turning 40
• Poem for Ruth in the Heatwave Summer of 1995
• Out
• Buddleia: Poem in Memory of Roberta Gray
• Black Mould and Mildew: Obsessive-Compulsive Poem for Lawrence
• Flights
• Poem about All the Space I Told My Husband I Needed
• Taking Blood
• The Fish in the Berlin Aquarium
• Wives in Mid-Twentieth Century American Fiction
• Give It Up, Moron
• Government Servants
• I Can’t Say I Love You
• Ode to Moy Park
• Poem in Homage to Built Things in Three Dimensions
• Malone Hoard
• The Glitch: Poem for 2016
• The Mast
• Poems Conceived as Dialogues between Two Antagonistic Voices
• First Dialogue
• Second Dialogue
• Third Dialogue
• NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS