Hannah Sullivan is a scholar whose work delves into the complexities of modernist literature, exploring the intricate processes of revision that shape literary masterpieces. Her insightful analyses reveal a deep engagement with the evolution of poetic form and thematic development, offering readers a fresh perspective on the enduring power of these canonical works. As an associate professor, she brings her scholarly rigor and passion for literary study to her teaching, inspiring new generations of readers and writers.
Hannah Sullivan's debut collection is a revelation - three long poems of fresh ambition, intensity and substance. In Three Poems, readers will experience Sullivan's work 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.
A hybrid new collection from the author of Three Poems—about London, terror, new motherhood, the Grenfell Tower fire, and how we live now. 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 memorializing strain in the forensic accumulation of detail, but there is also celebration, a keen sense of holding on to and cherishing what we can.