Introducing PBS Spring Recommendation Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan, published by Faber.
Hannah Sullivan’s debut collection consists of three ambitious and compelling long poems. ‘You, Very Young in New York’ is a wry and tender study of romantic possibility, disappointment, and the obduracy of innocence. ‘Repeat Until Time’ unfolds into an essay on repetition and returning home, at once personal and philosophical. ‘The Sandpit After Rain’ explores the birth of a child and the loss of a father with exacting clarity. Readers will experience Sullivan’s debut with the same exhilaration as they might the great modernising poems of Eliot and Pound, but with the unique perspective of a brilliant new female voice.
Hannah Sullivan lives in London and teaches modern English literature at New College, Oxford. After reading Classics as an undergraduate, she received a PhD in English from Harvard in 2008 and taught at Stanford University in California for three years. Her first published poem appeared in P. N. Review in 1998 and so this debut has had a long genesis. Her academic book The Work of Revision was, in fact, a study of the complicated and indirect ways in which writers draft and revise. She is currently writing a book on free verse, funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize.
'There is no stepping* into same or different rivers'
- Hannah Sullivan
*or falling... (no books were damaged in the making of this!)
