Flyweight

Flyweight is and isn’t about boxing. An epigraph in ‘Match’ quotes the Irish Featherweight champion, Barry McGuigan. When asked why he boxed, he replied: “I box because I can’t be a poet.”

Flyweight is and isn’t about poetry. Although the affinity between the two is almost a literary standard, with poets from Apollinaire to Declan Ryan equally compelled by the subject, figuring it repeatedly across a series of myth- making, metaphorising projects, as its own species of expressive language, improvised in action; the kind of poetry you live rather than write, the kind of poetry that chews you up, the kind that swallows you whole.

Here, both boxing and poetry shape a life. Here, the speaker will become bird-like, learn to soar (fly), but also become strong enough to deliver ‘punch-lines’ (weight). The instrument of this transformation will be body and breath, language and gesture. Flyweight celebrates the paradox of both arts: that they can provide force and substance to the girl fight’s swing, but that they might also lift her in her dance against gravity. It is not that one is a cipher for another, but that both have shaped and enriched a life; that both offer a way to negotiate between flying and falling.