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.”
Homes, in all her versions, are overpowered by the tragic ferocity of 14 June 2017, the opening poem about the Grenfell Tower fire. She lived nearby and was, at the time, nursing a new baby: “Cocooned, minutely logging feeds,/ self-made servant of my selfish genes,/ A mile away.” In the same poem, she describes visiting a Holland Park playground, its million-pound revamp wanton in context. Through her writing, she discharges an imaginative duty, but any question of how Grenfell should make us feel about our survivor’s luck is only implied, not laboured.
Sullivan often sends herself up in a delightful, minutely damning way. This includes her account of her first job as an estate agent (a contrast to her present role teaching English at New College, Oxford) and a pilgrimage to her childhood home in Northolt (London 2019/20) which is likably ridiculous: “I would be driving almost entirely at random and badly, close to tears, not indicating, around streets of interwar houses in Perivale or Greenford.” A faltering sleuth, her mission reveals “how mired I was in time”.
This collection happens mid-mire: in Happy Birthday, her tremendous, concluding poem, she turns 41. With anguished comedy, she writes about her fear of her body becoming “a curio, a thing that/ having lost its use value, is taken from the mantelpiece to polish, pass around”. And it gets (brilliantly) worse as she likens herself to a derelict peacock and a battered chair, purchased on eBay. But better to end up like these than to resemble her astoundingly accurate image for old roses that “crisp up like a pinched pair of teabags stuck to a spoon” (Northolt, July 2020).
Was It For This is taken from Wordsworth’s The Prelude. But Wilfred Owen’s Futility seems as relevant here (“Was it for this the clay grew tall?” ). For throughout, Sullivan’s wonderful, satisfyingly condensed writing counters precariousness and sees off futility.
An extract from 14 June 2017
On dry grey days we went to Holland Park.
The little children’s playground was revamped.
It cost a million pounds and looked the same.
I sat down on a bench, beside my pram,
Ignoring any email that came in,
Unravelling a racetrack from a Chelsea bun,
The baby on my lap, for safety sniffing him,
Addicted to his warm, sweet yeasty smell,
The buttered popcorn of the breastmilk nappies.
I was absconding from the life that I had had,
Committed to being small, nutlike, enshelled.
My phone was turned to silent so the calls just flashed.
I threw some sozzled raisins to the birds.
• Was It for This by Hannah Sullivan is published by Faber (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
