Flyweight by Maggie Sawkins

Description

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.