In Hannah Sullivan’s rare, sympathetic, exceptionally readable Was It For This, the sequel to her debut, the TS Eliot prize-winning Three Poems, much of her material seems not to have been expecting to find itself on the page. That is one of its strengths: the sense of details trying to mind their own business being not, after all, skipped – but unexpectedly seen. Holding her son on one hip and noting an outfit outgrown: “His dragon trouser legs,/ green tessellating scales,/ were halfway to the knee, so/ soon they’d be bagged up or binned.” Snot running down her face during her reading at her father’s funeral: “What the piece of loo roll couldn’t contend with – it was like trying to stem a flooding washing machine with a tea towel – ”. Full disclosure about a bathroom cupboard in a rented Paddington flat (no need for any snooping journalist in her case): “Expired sleeping pills, weed-laced lip balm smuggled back from California. A salt pipe.”
Her poems frequently shift into prose. Sullivan moves instinctively between forms as if stepping from one room into another, which is fitting because her subject is, in part, places she has called home. Wanderer and wonderer, she considers past addresses in Northolt, New York, San Francisco, London. She confesses, in London 2010s, to an “inability to make a home for myself”. She offers what could serve as an SOS to Marie Kondo, confessing to her dazed hoarder’s soul: “Sometimes I imagined that I might aestheticise what was really only paralysis – a stuckness in time, a clinging on – by putting these, individually microscopic, things into laminated plastic folders. But, despite buying the plastic folders, I couldn’t work out how to organise them.”
