You see that young woman sitting towards the back of the café – yes, her; the one you’d like to speak to, because she looks so bloody interesting, but you don’t dare approach, because she’s scratching words so intensely into that worn notebook of hers.

You see that young woman, whose black coffee has gone cold but who doesn’t give a shit because, right now, she’s away off in her head, pursuing perfect resolution.

You see that young woman who, as you look back through the café window, having paid and quietly left, is still falling through the page into the far-above.

You see that young woman, now only in your head as the ideal young woman writing in a café – that young woman who, as you circuit the world, you hope and hope and hope will one day get a publishing deal just so that you can finally read what she’s writing, all of it, not merely those fragments you managed to snoop over her shoulder on the way back from faked trips to the loo: ‘you can point at’, ‘you have been exactly that’, ‘not morbidly’ and once, oh my God, ‘my falafel-cooking predecessor’.

Well, that young woman, wherever you saw her – Belfast or London, San Francisco or The Hague – she’s got the publishing deal, and she’s typed the poems up (of course they were poems), and made the manuscript of her life, and sent it off, and back, months later, has come the book. And the book’s name is These Days, and the young woman who wrote it is Leontia Flynn, and – here’s the thing, here’s the real gasper – the book is everything you hoped it would be.

Even with the formal typography, it still feels handwritten and glanced-over-the-shoulder. To go high for a moment (but why not stay there?), each poem feels imbued with circumstance – real wallpaper surrounding the levitation, and funky carpet catching the shadow beneath.

The young woman is letting you in to her skin, to feel the textures it has brushed up against; some of them have left gridlike patterns, or single lines, or stains, or scrapes. And, of course, there were also the edges to abrade, slice and shave to a wince-making smoothness.

Finally, reading this book, you can fit the café-snooped phrases to their places:

My dream mentor sits in his room overlooking the city.
He can see the far swell of the Pentlands, the folk milling below
hapless as maggots. So we sit there in silence
like a couple of kids in the bath, till he says:

If you can’t be a prodigy, there’s no point trying.
Don’t fall for the one about the drunk, queuing in Woolworths,
who tells you his Gaelic opus was seized by the state.
If you can fashion something with a file in it for the academics
to hone their malicious nails on – you’re minted.
And another thing, don’t write about anything
          you can point at.

(‘My Dream Mentor’)

That’s a whole poem – I’m sure you knew that. That’s what a whole poem feels like; the kind whose glugs, as it fills, get deeper and deeper until they drop below hearing, and you know that the brim is reached, and only surface tension keeps it from overflowing.

So many people have tried to write these poems – I can’t tell you. Sometimes it feels as if everyone under the age of thirty-five, male and female both, has been aiming for this tone: diaristic and Horatian, of now but arm-wrestling with Larkin and MacNeice; like the moment when you realise not just that you like someone but that they are seeking to become your friend.

And the reason that almost everyone else has failed is that they simply didn’t hear it, this tone. Because, sitting at her table in that café, the young woman was listening to the heartbeat of her future reader – she was listening to you, to what goes on inside you. Far from being unaware of your presence, as you thought, she was coming to know you better than you ever knew yourself. You were her thumping catacomb, and she was exploring, pausing, notating every systolic and astystolic moment.

At a certain stage, what went on in her words ceased to be about sounds or syllables and started to become a tattoo of rightness: ink and rhythm, snare and skin.

Perhaps that’s what poetry is, or should be: you, being tattooed from the inside; you, with the sudden outrage of simultaneous hearts.

Another whole poem:

PET DEATHS
for Harvey

We were in two camps over the man in Edinburgh
who threw his dog off North Bridge,
then jumped himself.
                                        Some said
it was a kind of suttee: a failure of imagination,
‘That dog was not the man’s left arm,’ they said.
Others pointed out that the dog might have pined
or starved anyway.

My first death was a dog. There were no
minor heresies on my parents’ part. No
loving blasphemies to fool the kids
that this lassie-come-home of my childhood,
                                                                         who herded us
close to the ditch down country lanes, and who
– dying of meningitis no less – still sprinted the mile
    back
to where my father stood whistling,
                                    had gone to heaven.

Now we have our own pet deaths:
this is pluralism. And channel-surfing
between half-hearted atheism, superstitious Zen,
                                        I still see Harvey
– our late lamented dog; the terrier of my adolescence –
his cataracts clear, his bite returned and his tail wagging
one day spinning with me forever
from some bridge of oblivion.