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About the book

Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize

In her fourth collection, Leontia Flynn rehearses and resolves the concerns and forms of previous books, beginning with a sequence written in the aftermath of her father's death from Alzheimer's disease and during the care of her daughter in infancy. Moving on to explore the constructed nature of childhood, via a long poem imagining her mother's experiences in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and in an elegy for Seamus Heaney, the poems also seek to contrast the isolation and privacy of an experience of family life with increasingly pervasive and relentless digital technologies.

Drawing on a range of other voices and literary exemplars, including a tradition of verse drama and dialogues, and...