Hannah Sullivan is an ambidextrous writer. An associate professor of English at New College, Oxford, she recently published a book called The Work of Revision, in which she argued that the idea of revising as a necessary part of the creative process only began with early 20th-century modernism. Her alluring debut collection Three Poems (who knows how extensively reworked?) travels light, illuminated yet never shackled by scholarship, and investigates the way life does – and does not – revise itself. It is as though she were holding this Polish proverb up to the light: “Everything changes and nothing changes.” She writes freshly about everything, including sameness. She is a sensual conjurer of atmospheres – writing almost as a poet-restaurateur. On a single page: cloves, rainstorm, peanut oil, ozone, brandy, frost, freezing blood and peaches “sitting with their bruises” – each with its own tang. New York resembles a delicatessen – the food more precise than the people eating. Sullivan’s poems are as intense as Edward Hopper’s paintings (although more crowded).
There is intimacy in this collection – sex, giving birth, death. Could one come any closer to a writer than through these subjects? Yet much remains mysterious. Again – as in a Hopper painting – the characters border on characterlessness. In You, Very Young in New York, is “you” a substitute for “I” – her younger self? Or is she addressing someone else? The poem is a workout for the reader. I could not help wondering: what is the backstory to the backstory? It reads as though it wants to become a novel or as though it once was one. And how about the woman with “one arm raised” in a New York street? Is she about to hail a cab or saluting her passing life?
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