News at Eleven: The book weighs profit and loss

in terms of past and present, social and political developments. But its emotional core is in "private grief/or private fears", its struggle to reconcile an inner life with external pressures. On the one hand, Profit and Loss is shadowed by her father's Alzheimer's, a "slow accumulation of losses . . . First memory, then language" ("My Father's Language"). On the other, it is driven by new life, by the child in "Bubbles" who makes her way "still wobbly and astonishing,/over the language's uneven ground". In "Cyd Charisse", in which she remembers her father before his illness, what matters is "a lifetime of priceless inconsequential chat".

from The Guardian: Profit and Loss by Leontia Flynn--review

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