‘What makes Taking Liberties exciting is the challenge of it…. Taking Liberties takes nothing for granted, and the result is a conceptual scrimmage that feels cavernous and important’.

Suzannah Dickey, Poetry Review Winter 2023

‘When I laugh at these poems it’s not because they ‘amuse’ me as such, but because they are right, witty, insightful and sharp. When I’m moved by them, it’s not because they are sentimental or ‘warming’ – on the contrary. I’m moved because the poems are written with a clear eye, a clear ear, and an equal measure of grace and grit. [the final poems] act as moments (monuments) of reprieve and recovery: a brief respite from the gradual ‘breakdown’ … unflinchingly presented throughout this brilliant fifth collection. ’.

Tara Bergin, PNR 275 January – February 2024

‘Leontia Flynn’s Taking Liberties is her fifth book of poems and makes clear what many people have known for the best part of two decades: she is one of the very best poets writing in Ireland in the twenty-first century. Taking Liberties is a consolidation of various strands of her poetic lives: musical without being conventional, funny without playing to the choir, scholarly without being exclusionary, dark without being morbid’.

Stephen Connolly, Belfastmedia.com

‘Leontia Flynn’s Taking Liberties brims with Flynn’s subtle wit and sure-footed, surprising lyrics’.

Martina Evans, Irish Times Best new poetry collections of 2023

‘Flynn captures the tension between poetry as a personal impulse for freedom, and the human tethering to world events (one of her three epigraphs is a quote from Vladimir Putin). This, her fifth collection, is a thought-provoking, calming response to this “intricate, coping life’.

Maria Crawford, Financial Times Best Books of 2023

‘If Bachelard writes, ‘the value of an image is measured by the extent of its imaginary radiance’, this lovely Bachelardian inspired collection of Flynn’s is quietly luminous’.

Gail Low, DURA – Dundee University Review of the Arts