|
|
HomeGo to main siteEvents / other sitesTales of Hull & ERBook ReviewsFictionShort storiesNon-fictionPoetryAuthor - Annie WilkinsonAuthor - Avril Field-TaylorAuthor - Bruce EssarAuthor - Clive AshmanAuthor - Danny BirchAuthor - Daphne GlazerAuthor - David BrettAuthor - Dorothea DesforgesAuthor - Karen WolfeAuthor / explorer - Karl BushbyAuthor - Leslie WilkieAuthor - Linda AcasterAuthor - Nick QuantrillAuthor - Paul GenneyAuthor - Penny GrubbAuthor - Peter JonesAuthor - Richard SutherlandAuthor - Robert AdamsAuthor - Robert EdricAuthor - Simon KerrAuthor - Steven HallAuthor - Stuart AkenAuthor - Tim RouxAuthor - Tricia WalkerAuthor - Valerie WoodAuthor - Winifred HoltbyPoet - Andrew MarvelPoet - Andrew MotionPoet - Carol CoiffatPoet - Chris DawberPoet - Christopher ReidPoet - Cliff ForshawPoet - Daithidh MacEochaidhPoet - David WheatleyPoet - Frank RedpathPoet - Holly RoachPoet - Ian ParksPoet - Nick BoldockPoet - Pete MorganPoet - Peter ArdernPoet - Peter KnaggsPoet - Philip LarkinPoet - Stevie SmithPoet - TF GriffinPoet -Tony FlynnChildren's booksSports writingContact us
|
Waterstones in Hull are extremely supportive of
Hull & East Riding writers, and carry a stock of many of the books mentioned on this site.
Tony Flynn - winner of the 2007 English Association Poetry Prize
Tony Flynn was born in 1951 in Haslingden, Lancashire. He was educated in a number of Catholic schools, before going on to read Philosophical Theology at the University of Hull. After starting a PhD in the same field, which would look at the impact of Marxism on twentieth century theological thought, he turned to social work in 1978 and has since trained as a social worker and family therapist. He currently lives and works in Brighton where he leads a small multi-disciplinary child protection team, working with the most complex and challenging families where children are thought to be at risk.
His poetry first came to prominence in the 1982 anthology, A Rumoured City , which was edited by Douglas Dunn and with a Foreword by Philip Larkin. He has published two full-length collections, A Strange Routine and Body Politic , together with a number of limited edition pamphlets. The Mermaid Chair – New and Selected Poems appears from Dream Catcher Books. His work has appeared widely in leading magazines and anthologies and he has received a number of literary awards and bursaries, including an Eric Gregory Award early in his career, and an Arts Council of England Writer’s Award more recently. In 1994, he was the Arts Council of Wales Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Bangor, North Wales. His poem, ‘Seeing Voices’ won First Prize in the English Association Fellows’ Poetry Prize Competition, 2007.
"Seeing Voices"
Only with the light on my lips can you read what I would
say to you - sweet nothings come to nothing
in the dark, unless I let my tongue excite
its little code along your spine - You shiver at the word made flesh.
Tony Flynn will read extracts from "The
Mermaid Chair" on its launch at the wonderfully intimate Flux Gallery Press on Saturday 13 December 2008 at 19:30.
Click here for more details.
In 1980, Tony Flynn published “A Strange Routine”, a compelling map to his terrain of loss – the loss of his mother, of his wife, of his child, of his past. Twelve years later, his “Body Politic” came out, another outright masterpiece, this time including an extended mourning for the victims of state repression.
It has been sixteen years since then, sixteen years in which you get the impression from his new collection “The Mermaid Chair” he became disillusioned with the possibilities of the written word, although the opening poem “The Wireless” embarks with optimism, being the story of how his father struggled manfully, but in vain, with the new TV, even resorting to climbing onto the roof
“…….. like an angry Zeus, brandishing the aerial
like lightning in his massive hands …..”
before ceding the field
“to the wireless again, I learned to love how words disclose what does not correspond to anything.”
However, subsequent poems argue a contrary case – the inadequacy of the written word to describe the fullness of the soul: “Cosmology”, “Exalted States”, “Wound”, “The Ecstasy of St Teresa”, “Natural Worlds”, and “Love Poem” (silence). Indeed, there is much to be learnt within silence: “Sign” and “Seeing Voices”.
If I am reading this right, Tony unplugged himself from the anchor of his considerable art which nonetheless proved incapable of solving the problem, and moved onwards and upwards – specifically upwards:
Theology
Must darkness ever more abound? A worm cries out from the edge of creation – Forsaken too? A voice in truth against the odds – Beloved, though.
Tony’s earlier poems pinch you in the emotional groin after honeyed words. These are more cerebral, more questing, more eclectic somehow, and more random.
I am guessing here, but my hypothesis is that he virtually gave up writing except in odd moments of passion and compulsion. This is less biography and more archaeology – fragments to be pieced together.
There are many extraordinary poems here: “Fairy tale” which describes the consequences of the paternal suppression of independent thought; “The Scene of the Crime” where the shape of a departed lover is traced in the sand:
“Where you face was I score my name with a stick.”
….”Lectio Divina”, an exquisite poem which describes how Aberlard and Eloise poured over rare and sacred texts during the day, and over each other’s bodies at night; and “The Net”, a short piece on the beguiling, illusory nature of one last chance in a relationship.
And finally, the epiphany of the late birth of a child, and of a re-birth:
“……………….it seems that somehow there will always be one more note, half-imagined, just beyond each last pause we had taken for the end.”
Welcome back, Tony – as if you ever truly left. The new poems represent a different, contemplative, journey - one more than worth the price of the book in their own right. However, the inclusion of the out-of-print poems from “A Strange Routine” and “Body Politic” makes the decision a no-brainer. Do you want to have the collected works of one of the most brilliant poets of his age, the gently, humanly gifted conjunction of the Roman Catholic convert Grahame Greene and the agnostically Puritanical Philip Larkin, or don’t you? (TR).
Tony Flynn’s “Body Politic” eloquently addresses an intractable theme: how does the suffering and death of a political martyr relate to the ordinary lives of the rest of us? Is there a difference? Are all our lives not governed by politics and the effects of policies, yet experienced privately at the same time?
These are the questions that Tony Flynn asks as he nurses his fevered child in his arms (“Lullaby”), watches a small child, and maybe an adult, peeing in the bushes (“Christina’s Birthday”, “Seasons”), celebrates love and lust (“Light-Years”, “Gleanings”, “Portugal”, “Oracle”), watches people suffer and die (“Storms”, “Recovery”, “Cinematic”, “Last Rites”, “Blackbird”), or feels the pain of their passing (“Since You Left”, “Walls”).
Then there is the endurance and death of martyrs, in the Eastern Block (“The Bride”, “Dubrovlag”), a ‘disappeared’ in Chile (“Domestic Interior”), the Holocaust (“Elegy”, “Autumnal”), and a persecuted woman in Central America (“Our Lady of Guadalupe”).
And in-between, there are the lives overtly affected by politics with a smaller ‘p’ (“The Servant’s Tale”, “The Interview”, “Burnings”, “I.Q.”) and the transition between political and private suffering (“Veterans”).
This may all sound rather sombre, but Tony Flynn has one of the most serenely beautiful poetic voices in the English language.
And "Body Politic" is quite simply a masterpiece.
(TR).
Published twelve years before “Body Politic”, Tony Flynn’s “A Strange Routine” is, if anything, the darker work, penned, it would appear, in a particularly despairing period of his life given the topics covered, which include revisiting a childhood town as a stranger, separation and divorce, drifting and self-abandonment, silent rooms and institutional care, and stolen moments of romance.
The power of all of Tony Flynn’s work is that it is so personal, so incidental, permeated here with a real whiff of devastation and anomie, yet buoyed by a continuous undercurrent of humanity and elusive hope.
If we were to quote our favourites, we might as well reprint the book, but we will highlight three poems reflecting different aspects of the collection.
“Hopper’s American Hotel Rooms” stands out as a perfect word-image of Edward Hopper’s paintings, and one of several poems about still rooms.
“Growing” is his haunting piece about the collateral damage of divorce:
“You are the child I left behind. Two years older than when I saw you last …. Apart we grow old together, through the same years. At least our two hearts beat a harmony in this. But you are right, it is no consolation. To be in the same world is not so much.”
And, in the stolen romance section, there is the recollection of prancing around an empty students’ lodgings in “When The Others Are Away”:
“We are alone in the house; ……………………………… We indulge our run of the place – you in your bath with the door open wide; wandering back into the flat naked and excited, imagining eyes follow your wet prints on the floor. ……………………………..”
We have placed Tony Flynn's work on ‘automatic buy’ status. If he writes it, we will buy it. (TR). |
