First published in the Times Literary Supplement
Dingy flats and rented rooms are Leontia Flynn's territory in Profit and Loss. Anyone who has spent the first decades of their adult life (Flynn points out: "these days we're classed as youth / till 44") in academe or poorly paid work will recognize the succession of neglected digs she describes with a comic sense of bravery. Several of the poems in the first third of the book use the same opening gambit: "I once lived in a house ...". The effect is sometimes curious ("I once lived in a house with rusted locks"), sometimes macabre ("I once lived in the house of an infamous death"), and, cumulatively, deadpan. There is a trace of the stand-up comedian's patter in the movement of Flynn's best verse. Her most surprising opening lines are understated, with a faintly amused delivery, and she is not averse to a bawdy punchline in poems whose titles, at least, give some warning: "The Day We Discovered Pornography in the Mail" and "The Vibrator". The ease with which she moves between registers is most impressive in the book's centrepiece, "Letter to Friends", a long conversational poem modelled on Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron". Her manner is airy, though rarely arch like Byron's or Auden's in his "Letter" - she has a knack for working clever rhymes into the ode stanza without sounding self-satisfied, often invoking brand names in pairs such as "artefacts" / "Filofax" and "Apple" / "grapple".
Despite the collection's grim settings and even grimmer context - "a scary month for news" from the banking crisis to "the Church of Rome, / its awful crimes" - Flynn often strikes an optimistic note, and that note rings true in some of her more inventive conceits. Flynn's line in "The Girl Upstairs" celebrates the fact that "the rising wind / rumbles the bins and makes the drinkers shout" and neatly absolves the loud culprits, even as she tells us she is the girl crying in the poem. Meanwhile her description of a "mid-price, brick mid-terrace" in "The Dream House" would be flatly sarcastic if its "loving grubby marks" were not transformed by her vision of "some mythic beast in a distant land" beginning its "trek towards their life".
