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, offering a trenchant exploration of the ways in which we attempt to map our lives in space and time.

But there is also the wider, collective experience to contend with, the upheaval of historic event and present disaster. ‘Tenants’, the first poem, is an elegy for Grenfell, written from the uneasy perspective of a new mother living a few streets away. Elsewhere, from the terraces and precincts of seventies and eighties London to the late-at-night decks of American suburbs, intimately inhabited geographies provide reference points and sites for revisiting.

Nothing is too small or unlovely to be transfixed by the poet’s attention, from the thin concrete pillars of a flyover to an elderly peacock’s broken train. There is a memorialising strain in the forensic accumulation of detail, but there is also celebration, a keen sense of holding on to and cherishing what we can.

‘Rare, sympathetic, exceptionally readable.’ Kate Kellaway, Observer Poetry Book of the Month

‘Was it For This is a tour de force that fulfils its own powerful desire on the page.’ Martina Evans, Irish Times

‘Hannah Sullivan’s poetry is exceptional in the specificity and candour with which it draws on autobiography and retrospection.’ Stephen Knight, Literary Review