Was It for This

Hannah Sullivan's first collection, Three Poems won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the inaugural John Pollard International Poetry Prize. Was It for This continues that book's project, a trenchant exploration of the consciousness of daily living 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, by the 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 in the vicinity of Grenfell Tower at the time of its destruction. Elsewhere, from the terraces and precincts of 70s and 80s London to the late-at-night decks of American suburbs, intimately inhabited geographies provide reference points in a construction that sets the three distinct and formally experimental parts of the collection in conversation with one another. Nothing is too small or unlovely to be transfixed by the poet's attention, culminating in an effort to shake off the ingrained aesthetics of received opinion and, in revisiting the places of childhood, discovering instead the beauty in the thin concrete pillars of a flyover, the geranium brocades around a porch, or the consolation to be found behind the modernist rows of windows at the Chelsea Hospital. There is a memorializing strain in the forensic accumulation of detail, but there is also celebration, a keen sense of holding onto and cherishing what we can.