Three Poems

by Hannah Sullivan

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2018
One of Bustle's 12 Most Anticipated Poetry Collections for 2018

Hannah Sullivan’s debut collection is a revelation – three long poems of fresh ambition, intensity, and substance. Though each poem stands apart, their inventive and looping encounters make for a compelling unity. "You, Very Young in New York" captures a great American city, in all its alluring detail. It is a wry and tender study of romantic possibility, disappointment, and the obduracy of innocence. "Repeat until Time" begins with a move to California and unfolds into an essay on repetition and returning home, at once personal and philosophical. "The Sandpit after Rain" explores the birth of a child and the loss of a father with exacting clarity.

In Three Poems, readers will experience Sullivan's work with the same exhilaration as they might the great modernizing poems of Eliot and Pound, but with the unique perspective of a brilliant new female voice.

Genres: Poetry, New York, British Literature, Literature, Contemporary, Fiction, American

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 16, 2018

About the author

Hannah Sullivan lives in London with her husband and two sons and is an Associate Professor of English at New College, Oxford. She received her PhD from Harvard in 2008 and taught in California for four years. She is currently associate professor of English at New College, Oxford. Her study of modernist writing, The Work of Revision, was published in 2013 and awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy. Her debut poetry collection, Three Poems, was published by Faber in 2018 and was awarded the prestigious TS Eliot Prize.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This I thought was absolutely brilliant: three long, thoughtful poems full of deep thinking and beautiful phrasing, unified by the same light, clever tone. There's a certain neomodernist quality to the writing, especially in its conception – the expansive structure, stanzas calling to each other across the pages – which brings to mind Pound or Eliot (especially of the Four Quartets). I don't really like those poets very much, finding them too cold, too rebarbative; but what they did have is flawless formal control coupled with a kind of intellectual brilliance, things which aren't always much in evidence in modern poetry. Hannah Sullivan has it though.

The first poem, ‘You, Very Young in New York’, opens with a beautiful catenation of tercets playing off strange half-rhymes (cleanses/eventual, tooth/truer), so that you feel straight away that you are in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing. This modulates into something prosodically blanker, with long polysyllabic lines full of elbow-room and full, also, of startling little images of the city (‘the building opposite at night, the lights / Going off one by one, a diminished Mondrian’).

Though the setting is New York, the voice is identifiably English; this Englishness will come centre-stage later in the book, with references to the Telegraph, Sunday lunches, The Magic Faraway Tree, but for now it just registers as a certain outsider quality in the descriptions of the city, a few quirks of vocabulary, and, perhaps, a particular tone that gave me pangs of recognition straight away.

Sullivan is great at skewering the hipster conformism of New York, with its ludicrous cocktails (including one made from ‘porter, coffee rum, and Brachetto d'Acqui’ that ‘can only be written in Chinese’) and its received opinions (‘You are slightly disappointed in Obama's domestic policy, / You think the great American novelist is David Foster Wallace’). That policy/Wallace is another of Sullivan's half-rhyme specials, which never jangle in the brain but just catch subconsciously so that everything feels like it has hidden structure. Earlier in that section is an even crazier example, where we are eavesdropping on workers in a Manhattan office:

Things are illiquid, freezing up. Light is abortive
On the greyscale Park. It's time to short the fucking market.

Here, the vowel assonances mean that ‘abortive’ is somehow made into a compressed, concertinaed rhyme for ‘short the fucking market’ – whoo-ee! She's also very good on sex, bad sex, ill-advised sex with exes, the ‘bad banana taste of Durex on your tongue’ and similar details. It's a virtuoso performance.

In the other poems the point of view is older and wearier. ‘Repeat Until Time’ is an essay about the cyclic nature of existence:

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, eternally.

The clench of tonsil on extra tonsil is an oyster only once,
Once, the blood and itch of broken skin, and afterwards indifference,
The boredom of the weeping aromatic bedsores only once.

But, forever fumbling for the snooze button, the gym is there
Forever, and the teeth silt over yellow to be flossed, and there
Will be, in eternity, coffee to be brewed and that moment in the shower
When you open your mouth and rhotacise the water and just stand there,
Stupid bliss of hot water, tongue-tingling, steaming the shower.

(Rhotacise the water! I love this.) The final poem, ‘The Sandpit After Rain’, moves this circularity forward to look at birth (of the poet's son) and death (of her father), united by the setting of a hospital. Again, it is full of striking collocations and imagery (‘Think how suffering is, unanimated, / The iron filings of the laughter lines unmagnetised’). The three poems play off each other in interesting ways, and demand to be reread. I thought they were very inspiring, a total delight.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I saw her give a reading at the Faber Spring Party, Sullivan described her book as a hybrid work of poem-essays. That makes it sound more pretentious and less accessible than it actually is. The first poem, “You, Very Young in New York,” is indeed in the second person and shifts between loosely rhyming short stanzas/couplets and longer unrhymed ones. It’s full of fragmentary images of city life: drinking in bars, sexual encounters, the fast pace of international business (“In Chennai, meanwhile, a man is waiting for your analysis, / Eating his breakfast of microwaved dal and mini-idlis”), and the banality of hipster opinions (“You are slightly disappointed in Obama’s domestic policy, / You think the great American novelist is David Foster Wallace.”).

Poem #2, “Repeat until Time,” continues with the second-person narration and questions the notion of progress and what meaning a life leaves behind (e.g. “3.31”: “What will survive of us?”).

#3, “The Sandpit after Rain,” stylishly but grimly juxtaposes her father’s death and her son’s birth: “that there is no necessary season for things / and birth and death happen on adjacent wards, / that both are labour, halting and starting; / that women are always the middlemen / finding the coins…”

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the second of these three poems, Repeat Until Time, Sullivan describes Shelley as "Another dubious rhyming poet": she rails against his misogyny, saying "Both of his marriages had failed, / He was about to die. He was cruel." In the following section, she quotes two of his famous lines:

'True love differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.'

What crap. E. M. Forster hadn't even come out
When he used it as an epigraph: 'fine poetry',

Says his lame hero, grandly, brooding on sex.

In this poetry-essay, she first gives the examples of Shelley, Rilke, and Forster's hero as being misogynistic because they believe they can love more than one woman at a time, and then goes on to the particularity of the narrator's own life, in which she sees her once-lover with someone else. On a personal level, I don't agree with Sullivan's statements: yes, Shelley, Rilke and Forster were all misogynistic in their own way, but not because they loved more than one woman. Forster never came out except to close friends, because he was born in 1879, and it wasn't safe to do so. Why is she criticizing him for this?

This is one small extract from a dense, carefully constructed book. It's one example of something that rubbed me up the wrong way, and it's not fair to dwell on it too much. But it demonstrates why Three Poems didn't work for me. Sullivan is an accomplished poet, excellent at using rhyme and rhythm to structure and further her ideas. She's witty, and her poems are dense and full of references both to modern life and the poetic tradition. Her writing gives the reader a lot to talk and think about.

But for me it all rang hollow. The way all three poems look at life feels shallow, as though the poet is only ever picking at the surface of things. And that may be the point: this is a book about surface, about the ways we present ourselves. But it's not a detailed look at that. It's the experience of one attractive, white woman and the ways in which she navigates her upper-middle class life, and Sullivan doesn't give this context, she never makes us feel like this is one way to exist in the midst of a myriad of other ways. Poetry can be self-absorbed without giving the reader that feeling that it's erasing all the other lives around it. But Sullivan is consistently superficial, and never gives me the feeling I long for from poetry: a sense of the universal.

Perhaps that's why the section I quoted above rubs me up the wrong way. Sullivan seems criticises the writers she talks about for not having empathy for the people around them, for seeing their own existence as the only way to be, while she writes a whole book doing exactly this.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three Poems is Book Two of my October poetry challenge. I've been meaning to read this since it came out, and it did not disappoint. It was more expansive than I was expecting; the comparisons to Eliot are apt. And although this had A LOT of contemporary references, it also had a timeless feel. Impressive.

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three brilliant, exquisite and formally elegant poems which I ve been reading and re-reading for a few months already. She is an academic as well as the poet. She has been just rewarded TS Elliot’s prize, totally deservedly, imho.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

This stands out for me in a jungle of modern poetry. Totally recommend.

[emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘On the front page of the paper,
‘C-section surge in China as zodiac sign moves’.
Only one sheep in ten has a chance at happiness.’

It’s a decent collection of poems, but I’m just not the right reader for it. It started off rather slow for me, but I found the middle chunk quite enjoyable; and the ending to be somewhat like the beginning. Sullivan throws around pop culture references like glitter. Because she’s so generous with it, I can imagine that the poems would be less appealing to readers with a larger age gap (or even/if not then esp. to ‘foreign’ readers – readers who are not familiar with US/UK cultural references). I don’t know if I like her poems because I genuinely like her poems, or if it’s only because I was emotionally tickled by the pop culture references. But nostalgia is not really something I feel comfortable indulging in.

‘There is the long glissando of a motorbike on the arterial road,
A boomerang, the case of Saint-Emilion he didn’t get to drink,
The label working loose, the wine maderised,
The Magic Faraway Tree boxed up for grandchildren,
And, in your hand, the flawless yellow hide.
At night you leaf through Blyton in bed,
Crumble the book’s spine.
The wine you pour down the outside drain.
Black spars, sediment:
A shipwreck in a bottle.
Clots on the lung.’

I was gifted The Very Peculiar Cow and Other Stories by Enid Blyton when I was a kid. Adult me now would say that the book’s trippy as fuck. Unfortunately, I no longer have that particular copy of the book, but Sullivan’s poem made me recall the childish ‘joy' I had then, but I don’t think many will have the same experience reading it. Sullivan relied too much on her references to ‘things’ and popular/‘famous’ people/places/events. Not only is that sort of dependence only weakly satisfying, but it also makes it hard for readers to enjoy the poems. For instance, I would have felt very differently if I had not read Blyton’s books as a child. It would have been so tedious if I had to look up each reference she made in her poems. It’s almost (but not the same) like when I read Tao Lin’s Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for the first time, it didn’t hit as hard as the last time I re-read it. In a similar way, Sullivan’s poems are a bit demanding. It requires something extra from the readers – be it a specific set of experience/time or whatnots – to fully appreciate the poems. Having said that though, if I had to experience a particular series of bad sex the ‘voice in the poems’ had plus a messy pregnancy to properly enjoy her other poems, then frankly darling, that is too much to ask for. A hard pass, but thank you.

‘Short chains of carbon in the dust,
This is the practical answer.
Old laptops, pacemakers, leg pins.
DNA fibres revealing death’s cause.
Emails we sent and drafts we didn’t send.
The things we said and those we should’ve.
Downloaded porn videos reveal
Proclivities that shock our friends:
Cotton gags, string cutting into the clefts
Of twenty-something Japanese schoolgirls.
But nothing filthy enough to interest strangers.’

Sullivan’s poems are full of ‘objects’ and things. Almost every poem feels like an arranged basket of something. Some of the poems feel like a collage of clichés, but she plays with it in her own unique way to make them seem less so. But not enough to take away that kitschy quality of it. Her poems explore the most basic human experience, sometimes almost too basic. Nothing mind-blowing. I don’t think that reading her poems was a waste of time, but having read them, I can say for certain that I’ll never come back for a round two. I’m already effortlessly forgetting the poems. But for what it’s worth, Margaret Atwood had once said that recording the most mundane and ordinary writing would be of great help to fiction writers of the future.

���Acetate of Camel Lights,
Pheromones of human fear,
Public libraries’ unwashed armpits,
Sweet sweat like a pound cake rising,
Modern roses’ nothingness.’

Without the fantastic (albeit somewhat dated) form/structure, these poems would have been an ordinary, not-very-interesting mess. Still, it’s all too much style, and too little substance. I can imagine some of my friends actually enjoying Sullivan’s poems a lot more than I do. As long as one is acquainted with the references that she seemed to have simply assumed her readers must have had been, the poems are very easy to read. But having said that, I do prefer something that can surprise me or at least challenges me a bit more.

‘Someone who has been abroad can never come home again:
London is home and it is foreign.
Today there is no hurry, because you have no luggage.
And there is no one to meet you in arrivals,
There is only the emptiness of the Terminal 5 cathedral lighting,
The pop of a Krispy Kreme sign and the tan embonpoint
Of Scotch bottles after customs to caress: the last way
After travelling so long to delay returning.’

If I had to put my thoughts about Sullivan’s poems in a few words, it would be that they are very ordinary and/but very contemporary. It’s good writing, but nothing really impressive. I do like my poetry (and creative writing in general) to be a bit experimental so maybe it’s just me, not the poems. Also, I’ve only very recently read Jack Underwood’s brilliant new book, Not Even This: Poetry, parenthood and living uncertainly (a tremendous joy to read), and dare I blame him for ruining this for me? Because to read any book of poems after that would surely be of a slightly disappointing experience. Well, obviously I’ve read this in the wrong mood and at the wrong time, huh?

[Serge ♆ Neptune · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nah, didn't dig it bruv.

[Siobhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a captivating collection of three long poems that tell stories in a kind of new modernist way, mixing the tiny detail of modern life with poetic images and references to the past. 'You, Very Young in New York' feels like an updated Beat Poet type narrative from a modern female perspective, 'Repeat Until Time' muses on different things but focuses on coming home, and 'The Sandpit After Rain' is a detailed look at childbirth and parental loss. The little details and idiosyncrasies of perspective are some of the best parts of these poems, as well as a feeling of revitalising this style of poetry.

[Mohana]

If David Pascoe tells me to read something, I oblige

[Niklas Pivic · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Dani Dányi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Régóta ez messze a legjobb angol nyelvű vers szöveg, amit találtam. Persze nem akarom eltúlozni a rálátásomat a témára, de az öröm őszinte. Emellett kapott egy nagy díjat is, tehát mégiscsak alátámasztható objektívabban is.
Maga a szöveg? El kell olvasni, persze. Nem szívesen erőltetném rá az asszociációimat, kínos volna, hogy mennyire távoli és provinciális amit az angol költészethez oda tudok gondolni, kínos csak azért is mert magamat szeretném kompetensebbnek tudni, már csak gyakorlati szempontól is. Aztán jön egy ilyen szöveg, vagyis három, és egyáltalán elmegy a kedvem a mindenféle keretek és ítéletek és értékelési szempontok közé szorításától, és inkább csak maradjunk annyiban hogy majd elolvasom újra, és ajánlom, és ezt így kéne csinálni, tök jó.
Azért ennél talán – szóval életrajzi, önéletrajzi, de nagyon szépen és szabadon kezeli a formát is (mert van olyanja, érezhetően) és a képek és szavak, helyszínek, motívumok, hangvételek ritmikusan, komponáltan áradnak. Zeneien, hogy mégvalamit idehozzak, amihez nem igazán értek, de azt hiszem a szöveget így lehet zene-szerűen kezelni, mármint nem éneklősen hanem komponálósan. amilyen értelemben nagyon is szerkesztett és fegyelmezett ez a gazdagon kibomló szabadság.
Egészen visszahozta a kedvemet a versben gondolkodáshoz, friss levegő, friss perspektíva. Szuper.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"So we remember the courage of street cleaners
Because of the hopelessness of their work,
And house painters in seaside towns,
And the charity of shift workers in hospital car parks,
Because they sit drinking tea and smoking,
And do not care for fining the dying.
And the bonhomie of Manhattan psychics,
Squatting in their basements lit like brothels,
When the season refuses to turn,
And women spend Thanksgiving alone.
Everything is dry and dead and unclean,
And love spits for information.

So we remember our own teenage selves,
And their afterlives, and the soft nectarines
We didn't want to buy, and why..." (59).

[Angelica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I honestly feel like I'm missing a trick here, both because this book won the T.S. Eliot Prize and because all my friends adored it.

I don't *dislike* this collection, mind you. There are some lovely lyrical moments and beautiful sequences. It shifts geographies, tone, subject matter, and reflects the disaffection and detachment of our modern age.

But for me, personally, its very loveliness feels overly crafted and shifts into a kind of pretentious tedium: "Dull with the tang of freezing blood beside the skip of the Hudson wind." It feels more like I ought to like it, than I actually like it.

I think I like my poetry to feel effortless, inevitable, as organic and surprising as waterfalls.

Three Poems feels more to me like an Impressionist painting, lovely to look at, full of impressive skill and plenty of nuance behind every brushstroke, but failing to create wonder.

[James Xavier · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m glad to have “Three Poems” on my bookshelf.

I cannot pretend like I’m an expert on what precisely makes objectively GREAT poetry, but I know what I like and what makes me feel and Sullivan’s work makes me feel a whole lot.

Three Poems ebbs and flows like time, the transatlantic pull is so very noticeable in the vocabulary, as someone who lives away from the UK in North America, I can feel the magnetic pull of either continent through Sullivan’s writing.

The Sandpit After Rain is my favourite here, a stunning combination of obituary and celebration of new life, it’s equal parts mournful and joyful. Grand life-affirming material.

Again, my real analysis is nothing here. I like poetry when I like it and don’t like it when I don’t, I cannot articulate it much more than why I like a piece of art more than another aside from that, the technical writing ability of a poet is really beyond my ability to critique or celebrate. It’s just great.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first three quarters of this collection was absolutely beautiful and I was really interested in the writing. But, as the collection continued and I reached the last section of it I became very confused. I felt as if it was just a bunch of words put together to mean something but, that underlying meaning wasn’t able to be comprehended by the reader. Sadly this made me super confused and made it to where I didn’t enjoy the collection as much & was kind of let down in the end.

[Fern Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoughtful and observant poems

[Aumaine Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful in it’s scope, rhyme, and detail but sometimes reference heavy to the detriment of its emotional clarity. Still, these long poems feel like a feats of image and idea on the whole

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[andreea. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, that was disappointing. This collection looked like a fairly eloquent and intelligent one from afar, given the author's training and her awards. But it kind of lacked all that. Or, perhaps I just don't like reading about sex, pregnancy and New York filth.

From "You, very young in New York":
"And walking out of the house into a world overwhelmed with rain and light snow,
At more than capacity, so the taxi drivers are only in the middle lane
And the rose sellers have stayed home."

From "Repeat until Time":
"In Chennai, meanwhile, a man is waiting for your analysis,
Eating his breakfast of microwaved dal and mini-idlis,

Checking the cricket scores on his computer, reading Thoreau,
Wondering what New York looks like at night, in snow.

He is applying to Columbia, NYU Stern, and Stanford GSB.
He thinks of going abroad as an attempt to live deliberately,

Imagining the well-stacked fires in iron-fenced Victorians,
The senior partner’s grace under pressure, his Emersonian

Turn of phrase, the summers spent sailing, the long reaches
Of sand threaded with grass on Cape Cod beaches."

and:
"To speak of when and then and moments is a figure of language,
It is language addressing itself to what is not, and to what it is itself not,
Language with its simple action words, verbs:
Ich mag es nicht, vas-y toi, non sum qualis eram,
Language with its 'past' and 'future' and 'present'
Pointing to what it doesn't know, I love you, now, babbling of unicorns."

[hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the only collections I’ve read so far which focuses on long-form poetry, each one able to seamlessly relate back to the other two.

Hannah writes three poems: the first about youth in New York, the second about coming home to California, and the third about the death of her father and the birth of her child.

They are clear, deliberately slow with beautiful language, and for the time you’re reading them you’re completely absorbed. Long-form poetry is such a commitment and Hannah manages to give us the same energy and quality throughout.

A truly wonderful piece of work, with the third poem being especially moving.

Another masterpiece for my shelves!

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Hello HS these I feel are to be a kind of hallmark of the contemporary long poem. The blurbs declare Sullivan's proximity to Pound and Eliot which is quite bold and bizarre but the colossal laundry list of her academic everywhereness does make me doff here

We have a New York poem a Heraclitus poem and a bodily poem which I'm not going to call maternal but we can think of Fiona Benson and what that entails. I suppose I'm still digesting these but that's fine since I'll return to her soon enough but it's clear already that I'm having difficulty because they're poems not looking to be contained just look at that title. Perhaps the New York one is. Very well,

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was an absolute thrill to read Hannah Sullivan’s masterful ‘Three Poems’ after picking up a signed copy in Waterstones Piccadilly. Written with the measured control and linguistic sparsity of TS Eliot, between sudden bursts of rhythm and an overall clarity and depth of thought, Hannah Sullivan has created a long-form poetic triumph for our times. If you love or even just have a vague interest in contemporary poetry I think you have to read this work.

[Marie Mihalcea · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Think of a hospital ward at night:
The phone squirming on someone’s bedside table,
The doctors descending like robbers on the bed,
The youngest running from a dream he bad just begun”

“It was as if I had been planning to fly to Greece,
But ended up on a coach, listening to the toilet’s slurry,
With only a third of a book left,
And a flat warm bottle of San Pellegrino.”

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

i think i'm the wrong kind of depressed to read this right now, unfortunately

[Phoebe · Rating 3 out of 5]

overall kind of spotty/lackluster but i found the last poem, 'the sandpit after rain,' moving.

[Deedi Brown (DeediReads) · Rating 5 out of 5]

All my reviews live at https://deedispeaking.com/reads/. Thank you to FSG for the gifted copy.

TL;DR REVIEW:
This is a small but hard-hitting poetry collection about three stages of life: youth, cyclical aging, and both death and birth. Hannah Sullivan is a master with words.

For you if: You like to read poetry or want to challenge yourself to get better at it.

FULL REVIEW:

Now it is April and another summer. As you go past the subway
An older, also shoeless guy leaps out and shouts, “Girl, hey.”

He starts to twirl a topless bowler and it dips like an early swallow.
He raps, “I love you, girl,” getting low, and the sky over the Park
Whitens in a punched-out square, as one unlit cab follows
Another down Fifth and, through tears, you are laughing.

Three Poems was a really beautiful collection. I’m not super experienced reading poetry, but I’m trying to do it more often so that I’ll get better every time. This one challenged me a little bit, but it was so worth it. Hannah Sullivan is just so masterful.

As you’d guess from the title, this collection has three long poems in it. Each poem is broken down in to subsections of a sort, and the subsections use different forms — couplets, long stanzas, etc. The first poem talks about youth, and feeling stuck in it, and feeling free in it. The second poem talks about how life is cyclical. And the third poem looks at death and birth side by side, after the author’s father died as her first child was born.

The three poems all definitely feel connected to one another, not just because they are in the same book or because Sullivan wrote all three — but because she constantly brings you back and back. A line here, a phrase there, a moment of recall up ahead. There’s a powerful through line that tugs you onward.

It’s amazing how Sullivan triggered feelings of nostalgia in me, even for experiences I’ve never had. I’ll probably be rereading this one very soon — I’m sure I’ll get even more out of it.



TRIGGER WARNINGS: Pregnancy / childbirth; Death / grief

[emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the world and the entropy of things,
The plugged dyke and the sea coming in,
The emendation and the introduced error,
The floor before a toddler's pasta dinner,
The smooth pool waiting for the novice diver,
The girl's outfit for tomorrow and her mother's,
The first ‘I love you’ and the others.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best modern poetry I've read for ages. Some poets write really well about sex and some about death, it's rare to find one who does both with such skill.

[Goodreeds User · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every page is a treasure, I could read this again and again

[Pe · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow!