Three Poems

By Hannah Sullivan

Three Poems, Hannah Sullivan’s debut collection, which won the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize, reinvents the long poem for a digital age.

“You, Very Young in New York” paints the portrait of a great American city, paying close attention to grand designs as well as local details, and coalescing in a wry and tender study of romantic possibility, disappointment, and the obduracy of innocence. “Repeat Until Time” shifts the scene to California and combines a poetic essay on the nature of repetition with an enquiry into pattern-making of a personal as well as a philosophical kind. “The Sandpit After Rain” explores the birth of a child and death of a father with exacting clarity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9780374722050

Hannah Sullivan

Hannah Sullivan lives in London and teaches English at Oxford. She studied Classics at Cambridge, and then lived in the United States for a decade. Three Poems is her debut collection. It was awarded the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize and the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize.

Book preview

YOU, VERY YOUNG IN NEW YORK

Rosy used to say that New York was a fairground.

You will know when it’s time, when the fair is over.

But nothing seems to happen. You stand around

On the same street corners, smoking, thin-elbowed,

Looking down avenues in a lime-green dress

With one arm raised, waiting to get older.

Nothing happens. You try without success

The usual prescriptions, the usual assays on innocence:

I love you to the wrong person, I feel depressed,

Kissing a girl, a sharpener, sea urchin, juice cleanses.

But the senses, laxly fed, are self-replenishing,

Fresh as the first time, so even the eventual

Sameness has a savour for you. Even the sting

When someone flinches at I love you

Is not unwelcome, like the ulcer on your tongue

Whetted on the ridges of a tooth.

And when he slams you hard against the frame,

The pore-ticked sallow bruise seems truer

Than the speed, the spasm, with which you came.

So nothing happens. No matter what you try,

The huge lost innocence at which you aimed

Recedes like long perspectives, like the sky

Square at the end of Fifth whitening at dawn

Unseen, as you watch the unlit cabs go by.

---

The White Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen but on a cockroach on the tile floor.

All summer the Park smelled of cloves and it was dying.

Now it is Labor Day and you have been sleeping through a rainstorm,

Half aware of the sewage and frying peanut oil and the ozone

Rising in the morning heat, and the sound of your roommate hooking the chain,

Flipping ice cubes into a brandy balloon, pouring juice over them,

Ruby Sanguinello, till they giggle, popping their skins. The freezer throbs.

He has been beating a man he met on Craigslist, he has been dreaming:

Old New York, a James novel, a Greenwich Village Christmas,

A certain kind of frost in the Meatpacking District, and the smell of the carcasses

Dull with the tang of freezing blood beside the skip of the Hudson wind.

You have been thinking of the building opposite at night, the lights

Going off one by one, a diminished Mondrian, one ochre square

Where a woman undresses for the city, stroking her puffy thighs.

You hear him talking on the phone about you, his "petite

Reviews for Three Poems

[pdcread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.