Hannah Sullivan

Hannah Sullivan’s debut collection, Three Poems, has unsurprisingly enough got three poems within. The first is set in New York, and is about the experience of living there compared to the perception of what it was going to be like. The second poem concerns a move to the other side of America and is full of disconnected but repetitive themes. The final poem is about birth, life and death.

Three sooty wraiths
Fade on a bridge like figures on a vase

This a debut collection isn’t like a conventional collection of poetry, the poems are mix of short two line elements and longer more story like sections. Her writing flows from a tautness in certain parts to a fluidity in others, as she writes about sex, history, politics and place all seen from a very personal perspective.

Now nothing will ever be the same again
And everything will be as it always was

I did like this, mostly because it is not conventional, the short story form is mixed with short bursts of poetry, before longer passages return. I am still not sure that I get poetry still, I find it very difficult to review some poets work. However, I am not going to stop reading it as the mastery that Sullivan and other poets have over language is quite something.

Three Favourite Poems
Well, there are only three in here…
You, Very Young in New York
Repeat Until Time
The Sandpit after Rain… (mehr)

You are listening to Bowie in bed, thinking about the hollows
Of his eyes, his lunatic little hand jigs, longing for Berlin in the seventies.
You are thinking of masturbating but the vibrator’s batteries are low
And the plasticine-pink stick rotates leisurely in your palm,
Casting its space-age glow into the winter shadows.

This collection of three poems is simple, and seems to be speaking to persons who are active in the 2010s. At the worst of times, the book seems to try and say "Love me!", as with this:

You are slightly disappointed in Obama’s domestic policy,
You think the great American novelist is David Foster Wallace.
The epigraph to The Pale King is from Frank Bidart,
It is about pre-existing forms and formal questions in art.

And as you are dancing in a suit skirt to the Killers’ ‘Mr Brightside’,
Feeling the anthem soar and rise, he makes the PowerPoint slides

I can't help but feel that this book lacks details which speaks to or with, rather than at me.… (mehr)

Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan is the poet's first collection of poetry and the winner of the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize. Sullivan is a British academic and poet. She is the author of The Work of Revision, which won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and the University English Book Prize.

It is extremely refreshing to see the return of long poems: a detailed, flowing, narrative, that captures the reader and holds them in sort of a reading trance. Words and thoughts flowing through the reader's mind and occasionally hitting even a higher-level awareness. The lines connect in complex images and emotions. The reader will realize that this is what poetry should be -- full, rich, and rewarding. It is not the easy "poetry" of Instagram. This is for the mind.

Three Poems is exactly what the title describes. There is the innocent beginning in New York City followed by an adult period in California a period of repeating and patterns. The final poem cycles the reader back to a time that is the next step in life but also to create a new person to start the cycle again. Childbirth and death of a parent in this section complete the cycle of life, The acts are the same, but the people change. One cannot go back in time, but having a child is much the same as giving youth back, but not directly to yourself.

I can appreciate the New York City opening and life in an east coast big city. It is the city of immigrants beginning a new life, the beginning of style and music that others will soon follow. It is the excitement of youth -- "He makes it for the girl in leathers with a face like the Virgin Mary." and "Her fingers smelled of Camel Lights and lavender, and she is laughing." In California, the setting changes -- "Days may be where we live, but mornings are eternity. They wake us, and every day waking is absurdity; all the things you just did yesterday to do over again." We become a cog in the system and will make cracks about the hipsters (who a few years ago would have been us). Finally, as a parent, we see our earlier life in the child's future. We witness the circle. A decade and a half older than the poet I can easily relate to the scenes and settings of life that she experienced. Perhaps, that just goes to support the idea that we all travel the same cycle but at different times.… (mehr)

These are quite academic poems, which seem to take forms, topics and phrases borrowed from T.S. Eliot and other early twentieth century writers as their starting-points (sometimes seriously, sometimes jokily) but recast them into a very 21st-century frame of reference and a woman's perspective (famously culminating in a first-hand account of the experience of undergoing a C-section operation). The references are fun if you spot them, but I don't think it matters if you don't, as the writing is more than strong enough to stand up for itself. Sullivan has a lot to say about the Big Topics of birth, death, motherhood, etc., as well as plenty of sharp observations of the idiocies of modern life. Really excellent.… (mehr)