Tony Flynn Biography

British poet, born in Lancashire, educated at the Universities of Hull and Leicester, subsequently becoming a social worker in Walsall. His collections of poetry include A Strange Routine (1980) and Body Politic (1992); eighteen of his poems appeared in A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull (1982, edited by Douglas Dunn). Flynn's early work frequently employs minimalist strategies to produce poems of great concentration implying narratives derived from aspects of his working-class Catholic upbringing. The moral and emotional understatement in such writing is capable of moving effects. His later work exhibits an extended thematic range in its increased use of historical and European elements and its ready adoption of a variety of dramatic monologue modes.