LONGING DISTANCE

by Sarah Hannah

This is an extremely moving work. I'm struck by her intelligence of emotion, and her unmistakable voice. These poems are at once determined, vulnerable, and fierce; she looks it all straight in the eye. Shadow and lover these poems will fix you. Sarah Hannah is a true original. I love this book."" Annie Dillard ""The distance of longing, the proximity of the motives that animate these poems are the contours of perception in a mortal coil. Sarah Hannah is a physiologist of sight, devoutest scribe to the almost-seen, the intimated world, even, or especially, as that world is about to be lost. She is also a worker of wonders. See how, in her hands, the sonnet becomes an instrument of twenty-first-century meditation. See how the fish in the marketplace 'in greens and ices swimming' suddenly brings to life again the 'river lined with briars.'"" Linda Gregerson ""Sarah Hannah's poems are subtly alive to the many ways the natural world interpenetrates and informs and interprets human experience. But what impresses me most about them is their engagement with language itselfwords and the forms they assumeas the link between us and the circumambient universe. Her work says something at once new and very old, and something we badly need to hear."" James Olney ""Astronomy, Renaissance literature, mythology, music, a love of wit and verbal play combined with a passion for form and scholarship resonate in this lively collection of poems that marks Sarah Hannah's exciting debut. Whether she is negotiating Sapphics, syllabics, or sonnets, or contemplating ""the unperceived persistence/in the backward space of things..."" her skills fall gracefully under her sure and delicate control. This is a stunning first book."" Colette Inez

Genres: Poetry

61 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2004

About the author

Sarah Hannah received a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. She is currently completing her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences. Her poems have appeared in Parnassus, The Southern Review, Pivot, Barrow Street, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and other journals. She was awarded a Governor's Fellowship for residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for summer 2001 and 2002. The original manuscript which became Longing Distance was a semi-finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2002.

In 2006 Sarah Hannah was named Poet Laureate of a local conservation group, The Friends of Hemlock Gorge, of Newton, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Rattapallax, AGNI, and Fairy Tale Review (poem nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2006), among others. She was a contributing editor to Barrow Street.

Reviews

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longing Distance, by Sarah Hannah.

I had just ordered this collection, Sarah Hannah's first, when I learned that Ms. Hannah had died, apparently by her own hand. That fact unfortunately colored my experience of her book, making it seem perhaps darker than it really is.

There's nothing wrong with the more somber registers, of course; Sylvia Plath made enduring poetry from them, and there is more than a passing resemblance between Plath and Hannah. Both were masters of formal music and metaphor and the deeper figurations that encode that uncanny resonance which can lift the hair on a reader's neck. Hannah in this book occasionally feels too "Plathian," in fact—not so much in subject matter but in her tone of barely contained mania. Hannah seems to take an almost innocent pleasure in words, and so never uses them—the way Plath sometimes does—as emotional truncheons; maybe that's why my favorites among her poems are the ones that revel in vocabulary and are musically expansive.

Here's an example:

APOLOGY FOR SLEEPING LATE

You've done it again—slept
Yourself to obsolescence, slept
Yourself to Rotterdam on that slow
Velveted train, that impossibly expensive
Disorient Express, not express at all, circuitous,

Digressing inexplicably to Flanders,
Pas phalanx and loggia, paroxysm and
Quiescence; you've quaffed a pint of absinthe
Handed you by lackeys, washed it down with capers;
Night-sweated through our skivvies into Dordrecht

Where train transmogrified
To streetcar bearing signs for Rice-a-Roni,
And you thought yourself in Frisco, which meant
You gained three hours, so you slept on as streetcar
Flattened to canoe and skimmed through waters Delftly.

Tomorrow you will try anew.
Armed with rectitude, regret, alarmed
And freshly brewed, you will arise, atone,
Untorque, shut bedroom door and strap yourself
To straight-backed chairs of wood from noble trees.

No guarantee. It's not a trifle
To secure the pallid temple from the soak
Of narcotic tides, the throng of weeds encroaching
On the border. Which is all by way of saying you'll
Probably do it again—sleep through post and telephone,

And although there's not
A milkman to be missed, you will sleep
Through the milk's drinkability. In your defense,
You've been busy in the route; as you retrace the round,
It deepens, makes its layers known—profound, Pleistocene.

The things you've done in dreams—a life! Low Country.

Hannah's second and final collection, Inflorescence, is on my "read soon" shelf, but I tend to procrastinate when I'm about to read an author's last available book, so I can't swear I'll be reading it before summer's out.

As for Longing Distance, Linda Gregerson blurbs: "Sarah Hannah is a physiologist of sight, devoutest scribe to the almost-seen, the intimated world, even, or especially, as that world is about to be lost."

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful combination of lyric and formal poems. These are smart poems, emotional poems engaged with language.