Three Poems

Summary

Consisting of three long, formally ambitious poems, this debut examines the disappointments and texture of contemporary life—urban dislocation, the physical experience of grief, the difficulty of attention in an age of distraction—with a modernist's patience and scope. Sullivan works in a lineage that runs from Eliot and Stevens through Bishop, using breadth and accumulation to arrive at an emotional precision that shorter poems could not sustain. Judges praised her for returning a modernist ambition to contemporary British poetry.