Three Poems

Summary

Consisting of three long, formally ambitious poems, this debut examines the disappointments and texture of contemporary life — urban dislocation, the physical experience of grief, the difficulty of attention in an age of distraction — with a modernist's patience and scope. Sullivan works in a lineage that runs from Eliot and Stevens through Bishop, using breadth and accumulation to arrive at an emotional precision that shorter poems could not sustain. Judges praised her for returning a modernist ambition to contemporary British poetry.