Pattern and Chaos, Progress and Decline
Hannah Sullivan, Three Poems
Faber, 80pp, £10.99, ISBN 9780571337675
reviewed by Ben Leubner
Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems is one of the best volumes of 21st-century poetry I’ve read. I consider it something of a set of axioms that the best formal poetry is also always free, that the best free verse is also always formal, and that ultimately form and freedom are more synonymous than they are antithetical. In this regard, reading Three Poems was like encountering a demonstration of a proof.
In a similar vein, advancing a tradition often entails taking pains to interrogate and even dismantle it; propulsion is fuelled by resistance. Three Poems amply demonstrates this, as well, as it often simultaneously honours and casts off its heritage, perpetuating even as it overturns a legacy. Sullivan writes poised between life and death, youth and age, America and Britain, freedom and form. Each of these pairs in itself, along with others (continuation and repetition, for instance), and all of them combined, engage in a quantum dance across the 75 pages of Three Poems, each partner in the dance maddeningly and delightfully refusing to ever sit still, or even to say clearly and definitively that they are indeed themselves and not their other.
The title Three Poems brings to mind Ashbery’s 1972 volume of the same name, but once Sullivan’s first poem, ‘You, Very Young in New York’, gets underway via eight tercets of terza rima, the thought of Ashbery’s three poems is quickly displaced by the thought of Dante’s. Does the structural principle of Inferno-Purgatorio-Paradiso undergird Three Poems? Perhaps; only here, too, you can never tell which is which; all three poems seem to partake of all three realms equally. The first poem is about the paradise and very hell of being young, New York City equal parts City of God and City of Dis. The second poem, ‘Repeat Until Time’, has to do with both the delight and the torment inherent in repetition, the beguiling manner in which what repeats itself is always different, and precisely as a result of this the same. And the final poem, ‘The Sandpit After Rain’, captures in its title’s image something simultaneously beautiful and desperately sad, where the poem itself, about the death of Sullivan’s father and the birth of her first child six months later, refuses to resolve itself simplistically into a linear movement from grief to joy, opting instead for a complex non-linear form full of unknown variables in its consideration of and attempt to articulate the cyclical pattern of life and death, death and life. The birth of the child is as trying and agonising an ordeal as the death of the father.
‘Another dubious rhyming poet: Shelley’, writes Sullivan in ‘Repeat Until Time’, in a section that consists of 18 rhyming couplets. Thus, another dubious rhyming poet: Sullivan. But Sullivan, in Three Poems, also breathes fresh life back into rhyme, meter, form. She might aver that ‘When things are patternless, their fascination’s stronger. Failed form is hectic with loveliness, and compels us longer’, but the very poem in which this is said challenges the claim. A pattern that initially looks like patternlessness is what’s most fascinating, form that looks as though it’s failed most lovely and compelling. One often has to look closely in Three Poems to detect the pattern and form within what otherwise looks like loose assemblage. It might seem as though the first poem has seven sections, the second one 17, and the third one 22, but all three poems also consist of four sections each by my count, with the opening terza rima stanzas of the first poem constituting a kind of prologue. There is thus at once symmetry and asymmetry; the rhymes are often ghosts of rhyme: San Francisco/studio, Mission/heartbroken, avenues/freeways. Sometimes the verse is free, sometimes it’s prose, and sometimes it’s metrically regular: ‘True form is overlaid, like moss on broken tiles.’ Sometimes it’s somehow all three at once. Many things about this book are dubious.
‘It is hard to say if there is progress in History.’ Or poetry. Or life. Some amount of progress seems to have accrued between the first poem and the last, as the ‘very young’ daughter has now become a mother. Or, it’s some amount of loss that’s been tallied, of one’s youthful vitality, of one’s father, of one’s faith in the very traditions that inform and guide one’s life. Life, like poetry, like history, would seem to be some kind of combination of form and formlessness, pattern and hectic chaos, progress and decline. Kierkegaard says that yes, life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Sullivan writes, ‘True form is often seen only in retrospect, too late.’ What your life when you were very young in New York meant couldn’t be understood when you were there, but only afterwards, and perhaps less as a result of eventual discovery than of eventual fabrication. True form is only seen in retrospect, that is, because it’s only then that it is crafted and bestowed upon what, in the moment, was patternless. Form, in this conception, is a product of artifice. But if true form is also ‘overlaid, like moss on broken tiles’, then in the end it is less artifice (that would be the tiles themselves) than something natural that actually obscures artifice. In this sense it’s not the result of our deliberate, retrospective mental manoeuvres, but something we have to let overtake them. Still, in either case, the passage of time is required, and might, in fact, be what we’ve been talking about all along.
There is a marked distance between ‘You take your clothes off when he puts his hands over your nipples’ and ‘Look at my breasts, they are school bells.’ Fifty pages, in fact, or something like 20 years, the young woman become a mother. The second person concerns of ‘You, Very Young in New York’ are not the concerns of the largely first person narration of ‘The Sandpit After Rain,’ though there are connecting threads that exist between them, and the final poem does itself, of occasion, shift into the second person, commanding its own speaker to remember, think, look, and forget. Everything changes, and nothing does. These are beautiful poems.
In a similar vein, advancing a tradition often entails taking pains to interrogate and even dismantle it; propulsion is fuelled by resistance. Three Poems amply demonstrates this, as well, as it often simultaneously honours and casts off its heritage, perpetuating even as it overturns a legacy. Sullivan writes poised between life and death, youth and age, America and Britain, freedom and form. Each of these pairs in itself, along with others (continuation and repetition, for instance), and all of them combined, engage in a quantum dance across the 75 pages of Three Poems, each partner in the dance maddeningly and delightfully refusing to ever sit still, or even to say clearly and definitively that they are indeed themselves and not their other.
The title Three Poems brings to mind Ashbery’s 1972 volume of the same name, but once Sullivan’s first poem, ‘You, Very Young in New York’, gets underway via eight tercets of terza rima, the thought of Ashbery’s three poems is quickly displaced by the thought of Dante’s. Does the structural principle of Inferno-Purgatorio-Paradiso undergird Three Poems? Perhaps; only here, too, you can never tell which is which; all three poems seem to partake of all three realms equally. The first poem is about the paradise and very hell of being young, New York City equal parts City of God and City of Dis. The second poem, ‘Repeat Until Time’, has to do with both the delight and the torment inherent in repetition, the beguiling manner in which what repeats itself is always different, and precisely as a result of this the same. And the final poem, ‘The Sandpit After Rain’, captures in its title’s image something simultaneously beautiful and desperately sad, where the poem itself, about the death of Sullivan’s father and the birth of her first child six months later, refuses to resolve itself simplistically into a linear movement from grief to joy, opting instead for a complex non-linear form full of unknown variables in its consideration of and attempt to articulate the cyclical pattern of life and death, death and life. The birth of the child is as trying and agonising an ordeal as the death of the father.
‘Another dubious rhyming poet: Shelley’, writes Sullivan in ‘Repeat Until Time’, in a section that consists of 18 rhyming couplets. Thus, another dubious rhyming poet: Sullivan. But Sullivan, in Three Poems, also breathes fresh life back into rhyme, meter, form. She might aver that ‘When things are patternless, their fascination’s stronger. Failed form is hectic with loveliness, and compels us longer’, but the very poem in which this is said challenges the claim. A pattern that initially looks like patternlessness is what’s most fascinating, form that looks as though it’s failed most lovely and compelling. One often has to look closely in Three Poems to detect the pattern and form within what otherwise looks like loose assemblage. It might seem as though the first poem has seven sections, the second one 17, and the third one 22, but all three poems also consist of four sections each by my count, with the opening terza rima stanzas of the first poem constituting a kind of prologue. There is thus at once symmetry and asymmetry; the rhymes are often ghosts of rhyme: San Francisco/studio, Mission/heartbroken, avenues/freeways. Sometimes the verse is free, sometimes it’s prose, and sometimes it’s metrically regular: ‘True form is overlaid, like moss on broken tiles.’ Sometimes it’s somehow all three at once. Many things about this book are dubious.
‘It is hard to say if there is progress in History.’ Or poetry. Or life. Some amount of progress seems to have accrued between the first poem and the last, as the ‘very young’ daughter has now become a mother. Or, it’s some amount of loss that’s been tallied, of one’s youthful vitality, of one’s father, of one’s faith in the very traditions that inform and guide one’s life. Life, like poetry, like history, would seem to be some kind of combination of form and formlessness, pattern and hectic chaos, progress and decline. Kierkegaard says that yes, life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Sullivan writes, ‘True form is often seen only in retrospect, too late.’ What your life when you were very young in New York meant couldn’t be understood when you were there, but only afterwards, and perhaps less as a result of eventual discovery than of eventual fabrication. True form is only seen in retrospect, that is, because it’s only then that it is crafted and bestowed upon what, in the moment, was patternless. Form, in this conception, is a product of artifice. But if true form is also ‘overlaid, like moss on broken tiles’, then in the end it is less artifice (that would be the tiles themselves) than something natural that actually obscures artifice. In this sense it’s not the result of our deliberate, retrospective mental manoeuvres, but something we have to let overtake them. Still, in either case, the passage of time is required, and might, in fact, be what we’ve been talking about all along.
There is a marked distance between ‘You take your clothes off when he puts his hands over your nipples’ and ‘Look at my breasts, they are school bells.’ Fifty pages, in fact, or something like 20 years, the young woman become a mother. The second person concerns of ‘You, Very Young in New York’ are not the concerns of the largely first person narration of ‘The Sandpit After Rain,’ though there are connecting threads that exist between them, and the final poem does itself, of occasion, shift into the second person, commanding its own speaker to remember, think, look, and forget. Everything changes, and nothing does. These are beautiful poems.