Here is infinity, obscured by a bus

Hannah Sullivan's Three Poems

I wish Hannah Sullivan’s poetry collection, Three Poems, which won the T.S. Eliot prize in 2019, had got more attention. Or, more specifically, I wish that the first poem in this collection, You, Young in New York, had got the same kind of buzz as TV shows like Girls and Industry, or novels like Sally Rooney’s or Expectation. If you’re not sure about poetry, but enjoyed any of these, then you might love You, Young in New York. And it might help to know that Sullivan tried to write this first poem as a novel, which she talks about in a lovely episode of Literary Friction.

This poem is about trying to navigate adult horizons; the mess that is your twenties (or forties, sixties…) with both a body and a mind that rarely feel like your own. It has it all: the requisite bad sex, late nights at the office, drunken parties, horrible hangovers, sitting in coffee shops trying to write a novel (ahem). And then turns these into an experience that stuck with me long after it was over. I go back to this poem (and the whole collection) again and again.

Poetry, by its very nature, does more with less. It distills every experience down to its essence. Like alcohol, this distillation only increases the power and effect. Each line, each word, is a hefty shot that can floor you. 

Take one of my favourite ever lines: 

Here is infinity, obscured by a bus

That line manages to encapsulate almost my entire twenties living in a new city. It’s all right in front of you; infinity is right there. The person you think you should be, the life you think you should lead; long, open roads of the city stretching out ahead - it all seems within your grasp. 

But there’s a bloody bus in the way.

You could replace ‘bus’ with, well, any number of painfully mundane obstacles that got (and continue to get) in the way of your potential. I love the cadence of that line, the effect of the comma. The first part rises, as if it’s being shouted with open arms - Here is infinity! And then the comma is a lead balloon, dragging us back down to earth.

It’s perfect. 

But it isn’t just that first poem I think you might love, it’s the entire collection. And if that line has competition for my favourite line, it’s this stanza from Repeat Until Time, which is the second poem in the collection and about repetition* in all its various forms, in all its gory detail: 

Days may be where we live, but mornings are eternity.

They wake us, and every day waking is absurdity

All the things you just did yesterday to do over again, eternally.    

This didn’t need a pandemic to hit home but now it’s got one, brutalising the punch.

The final poem, The Sandpit After Rain, is about the death of a father and the birth of a child. It’s devastating. It can also be very funny: 

I wanted to vomit but my body had no rotation, so I said,

‘I want to die’, quite loudly, and everyone was angry. 

You’re not going to die, you’re going to have a baby. 

…

Afterwards we agreed I had not been very brave. 

That tone - the combination of heartbreaking and hilarious, bleak and hopeful, profound and flippant - runs through the whole collection and is just one of the a million fantastic things about it. 

I hope you love it.

P.S. if you want to geek out a bit on poetry but in a very entertaining way, then you might love Alan Bennett’s ‘Six Poets’. The six include Auden and Macniece for whom I’m an absolute sucker. There’s a little biography for each poet and a bit of commentary on each poem. And it’s Alan Bennett so obviously it’s funny, sharp, and moving.

* The very enjoyable film Palm Springs makes a nice pairing with this second poem; they both go down easy.