Was It for This

A hybrid new collection from the author of Three Poems—about London, terror, postpartum anxiety, 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, a trenchant exploration of the consciousness of daily living and the way in which we attempt to map our lives in time and space. Here is a life recalled through the dwelling places that have contained it, by the associated people, paraphernalia, and peculiar rites of an individual existence. "Tenants," the first poem, is fueled by the particular anxieties of a mother of young children living in the vicinity of Grenfell Tower at the time of its destruction. Elsewhere, from the terraces and precincts of 1970s London to the American suburbs, nothing is too small or unlovely to be transfixed by the poet’s attention. There is a memorializing strain in the forensic accumulation of detail, but there is also celebration, a keen sense of holding onto and cherishing what we can.