Was It for This

Author: Hannah Sullivan

Number of Pages: 112

Hannah Sullivan’s first collection, Three Poems won the T.S. Eliot Prize andthe inaugural John Pollard International Poetry Prize. Was It for This continuesthat book’s project, a trenchant exploration of the consciousness of dailyliving and the way in which we attempt to map our lives in time and space. Here is a life recalled through the dwelling places that have contained it, bythe associated people, paraphernalia and peculiar rites of an individual existence.But there is also the wider, more collective experience to contend with,the upheavals of historic event and present disaster. ‘Tenants’, the first poem,is fuelled by the particular anxieties of a mother of young children living inthe vicinity of Grenfell Tower at the time of its destruction. Elsewhere, fromthe terraces and precincts of 70s and 80s London to the late-at-night decks ofAmerican suburbs, intimately inhabited geographies provide reference pointsin a construction that sets the three distinct and formally experimental partsof the collection in conversation with one another. Nothing is too small orunlovely to be transfixed by the poet’s attention, culminating in an effort toshake off the ingrained aesthetics of received opinion and, in revisiting theplaces of childhood, discovering instead the beauty in the thin concrete pillarsof a flyover, the geranium brocades around a porch, or the consolation to befound behind the modernist rows of windows at the Chelsea Hospital. Thereis a memorializing strain in the forensic accumulation of detail, but there isalso celebration, a keen sense of holding onto and cherishing what we can.