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Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Wednesday, November 22, 2017 12:30 am by M. in    No comments
The Radio is the latest poetry collection by Leontia Flynn and includes a Brontë-related poem:
The Radio
Leontia Flynn
Jonathan Cape, 2017
ISBN: 978-1787330085
The included poem is:
The Brunties: An Elegy

Let's not have any more poems on the Brontës.
No, none of the weird sisters toiling in the gloom
to fan some inner flame (a grim, al dente gruel might cool nearby) no lamp, no tomb-
like interior filled with — what? — moor-wide minds;
and the father, kind and peculiar: let him drop.
The son too, lone and lost — and all that doom,
cod as their umlaut ... reboot. Photoshop

in particular the grating nonchalance
with which each contrived of some retro malaise,
quite without warning, to be — presto! —dead
inside an hour, as Emily watched dance
the cherry tree, the Autumn sun's low rays ...
and 'Alright. Get the doctor now,' she said. 
The Irish Times reviews the collection:
Flynn’s instinct for or, better, her insistence on, other, awkward voices is clear: “The world is born of hysterical men and women. / Our teeth are shiny as accidental stars” (Poem in Praise of Hysterical Men and Women). That poem is part of a set that honours kindred spirits, Bobby Fischer, the Brontës, Hopkins (“his muse being bi[nsey] po[p]lar[s]”) and MacNeice, whose talky, free-wheeling, suddenly acute poems have clearly been good companions to this book. (John McAuliffe)

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