Leontia Flynn’s Poetic “Museums”: Losing, Saving, and Giving Away Belfast’s Trash

Leontia 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.¹ 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 of the self. These poems cannot disavow the father’s loss, but only chart it, and display those records in well-wrought, but inconspicuously, formal poems.

Flynn was only twenty-years-old when the Good Friday Agreement was signed; the Belfast of the “Troubles,” of permanent British army sentry posts, elaborate security checkpoints, and helicopter patrols is mostly gone now. In Part III of her long formal poem “Letter to Friends,” which appears at the center of her latest volume Profit and Loss, Flynn reports that “Belfast, long the blight / and blot on lives has now brought to an end /or several ends, its grim traumatic fight.”² Despite occasional outbursts of sectarian frustration (such as the Loyalist protests against marching bans in the Ardoyne and Crumlin Roads during July of 2013), Belfast is now working hard to set aside its reputation for conflict and to bring in visitors. The peace accords have afforded time and security for mural makers to prettify and expand sectarian murals, which are “secretly” featured in Black Cab tours of the city. In an era of peace and de- industrialization, Belfast has increasingly become a city of tourist-attracting historical, industrial, and military museums—actual museums of brick-and-mortar, not the poetic constructions that Flynn creates. The Crumlin Gaol, a Victorian prison, was closed in 1996, but, after extensive renovation, is now open to tourists. The remaining buildings of the notorious Maze Prison, with its infamous H-Blocks in which Bobby Sands and others carried on sometimes fatal hunger strikes in 1981 closed in 2000, and has been almost fully razed since demolition began in 2006; the site is being redeveloped as a peace center. In the Falls Road district, an Irish republican museum (Iarsmalann na Staire Poblachtach Éireannach) opened in 2007.

During the affluent 1990s, Belfast public officials commissioned an eight-storey sculptural building to house the museum known as Titanic Belfast. The architecture, designed by the American-born architect Eric Kuhne, reproduces the shape and size of the Titanic’s hull in a shining glass, connected quadruplicate. Nearby, the famous yellow Harland and Wolff cranes long ago ceased to hoist ships and were abandoned, but as industrial ruins they are now designated as historical monuments; the cranes are considered icons, rather than eyesores. As the city of Belfast is beginning systematically to transform itself...