Leontia Flynn’s Poetic “Museums”: Losing, Saving, and Giving Away Belfast’s Trash
2014; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/nhr.2014.0034
ISSN1534-5815
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoLeontia Flynn was born in Belfast in 1974. She grew up, was educated in, and continues to reside in the city. She is one of a generation of post-“Troubles” poets of the New Belfast. Her poems set in her native Belfast often serve as, in a sense, what Orhan Pamuk terms “museums” of the speakers’ lives and times in a community that must redefine itself in many ways: the New Belfast is no longer a place of open military conflict, no longer an industrial center, and no longer a place that tourists seek to avoid. Her speakers—like any of us who make scrapbooks, arrange photos in albums, or collect significant objects and pass them on in our wills—want to be the curators of their own pasts. In her three published volumes of poetry, These Days (2004); Drives (2008); and, Profit and Loss (2011), Flynn sets many of her wry and affectionately humorous poems in a Belfast littered with objects, words, and meanings that have been loosed or altogether disconnected from their functions and from each other. Her speakers attempt to rescue such detritus from descending into insignificance by archiving and ordering them within the poems, and in in the process, creating written museums of the New Belfast. Her speakers are themselves often uncertain about the project of trying to order such random objects and things; they simultaneously avow and disavow this loss of both stuff (the imprecision of the word “stuff” is intentional) and the meanings of such stuff. The attempt to make meaning of this material is complicated further when the speakers have a father ravaged by Alzheimer’s. In that situation, the father loses the capacity to create and keep his own museums
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