Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. This week, I am looking at an airplane

is going over, I don't know if you can hear that. It's okay, life goes on, poetry remains

in its ivory tower. It's not, I don't actually think, ivory tower, it's, I think, bakelite.

Anyway, Leonshire Flynn wrote a collection of poems. I'm fairly confident, by the way,

that Leonshire is how you say her first name. It's L-E-O-N-T-I-A. If I'm wrong, then

I apologise to her and her followers. Anyway, I come here to praise her, not to pronounce

her. And profit and loss is the collection that I want to talk about. It's a 2011 collection. It is

tremendous. And such is my confidence in the material in this book. I thought what I would do is

open it randomly at a page or pages, facing pages and do those two poems. So not only am I doing

profit and loss, I'm doing pages 24 and 25 of profit and loss. The focus tightens to just those

two facing pages. And there is a poem on each of those and I want to talk about them because I like

them. That's my point. I also like the randomness of opening a book at a page and seeing what happens.

I once was in a slight mess in my life and I decided to open the Bible and say whichever

passage was first on the right hand page, that would aid my decision. And I can't remember

it word for word, but the first passage on that page said, and Jay Fett begat mellakim

or something of that nature. I just couldn't make it fit with the problem in hand. So it's not

foolproof, but I'm confident of Leoncha Flynn's ability that you can open this book anywhere and find

gold. On page 24, I'd like to tell you about it. Here is the first few lines. You find yourself

suddenly very badly drunk at a ritzy do in some renovated warehouse. You are talking at speed

to a man who's almost handsome in a Hollywood way, except for his terrible teeth. What's wrong

with these teeth? They slant inwards like a shark's. And this is the last clear thought you will

recall when you wake to the drama of an unknown room. I love it. The drama of an unknown room. We

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