Three Poems

Three Poems is exactly what its title says, and the plainness is the provocation: Hannah Sullivan's debut consists of three long poems, each substantial enough to hold a life stage, and together they make an argument that the long poem, not the anthology lyric, is where contemporary experience actually fits. You, Very Young in New York follows a young woman through the city's repetitions, work, parties, hangovers, almost love, in verse that lets glamour and futility share every line; New York is rendered as the place where nothing happens again and again, beautifully, the modern city's promise audited by someone young enough to keep believing it. Repeat Until Time begins with a move to California and becomes a meditation on repetition itself, on returning home, philosophy conducted with a poet's concreteness. The Sandpit After Rain brings the questions home, holding a birth and a death in one domestic year, the body's beginnings and endings observed with clinical tenderness, high modernism's portentousness deliberately punctured by nappies, hospitals, and rain on a sandpit. Sullivan is an Oxford academic whose scholarship is on modernist style, and the book reads like the work of someone who knows exactly which permissions she is taking, Eliot's structures repurposed for female, embodied, twenty first century material. The judges, chaired by Sinéad Morrissey, chose it unanimously, an astonishing debut, and the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize made Sullivan the third debut winner in four years, confirmation that the prize's doors, shut to first books for two decades, now stood open.