Description

Book Synopsis

A hybrid new collection from the author of Three Poemsabout 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 atten

Was It for This

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    A Hardback by Hannah Sullivan

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    RRP £26.00 – you save £6.50 (25%)

    Order before 4pm tomorrow for delivery by Wed 11 Nov 2026.

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      Book details

      Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
      Published 24 January 2023
      ISBN-13 9780374607982
      978-0374607982
      ISBN-10 0374607982

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      A hybrid new collection from the author of Three Poemsabout 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 atten

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