Three Poems
Author: Hannah Sullivan
Publisher: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
“You, Very Young in New York” paints the portrait of a great American city, paying close attention to grand designs as well as local details, and coalescing in a wry and tender study of romantic possibility, disappointment, and the obduracy of innocence. “Repeat Until Time” shifts the scene to California and combines a poetic essay on the nature of repetition with an enquiry into pattern-making of a personal as well as a philosophical kind. “The Sandpit After Rain” explores the birth of a child and death of a father with exacting clarity.
TL;DR Review
This is a small but hard-hitting poetry collection about three stages of life: youth, cyclical aging, and both death and birth. Hannah Sullivan is a master with words.
For you if: You like to read poetry or want to challenge yourself to get better at it.
Full Review
Now it is April and another summer. As you go past the subway
An older, also shoeless guy leaps out and shouts, “Girl, hey.”He starts to twirl a topless bowler and it dips like an early swallow.
He raps, “I love you, girl,” getting low, and the sky over the Park
Whitens in a punched-out square, as one unlit cab follows
Another down Fifth and, through tears, you are laughing.
Three Poems was a really beautiful collection. I’m not super experienced reading poetry, but I’m trying to do it more often so that I’ll get better every time. This one challenged me a little bit, but it was so worth it. Hannah Sullivan is just so masterful.
As you’d guess from the title, this collection has three long poems in it. Each poem is broken down into subsections of a sort, and the subsections use different forms — couplets, long stanzas, etc. The first poem talks about youth, and feeling stuck in it, and feeling free in it. The second poem talks about how life is cyclical. And the third poem looks at death and birth side by side, after the author’s father died as her first child was born.
The three poems all definitely feel connected to one another, not just because they are in the same book or because Sullivan wrote all three — but because she constantly brings you back and back. A line here, a phrase there, a moment of recall up ahead. There’s a powerful through line that tugs you onward.
It’s amazing how Sullivan triggered feelings of nostalgia in me, even for experiences I’ve never had. I’ll probably be rereading this one very soon — I’m sure I’ll get even more out of it.
Trigger Warnings
Pregnancy / childbirth
Death / grief
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