Was It for This

Was It for This comprises three autobiographical pieces. The title work is a midlife reckoning: “Suddenly, I’d done all the things.” Sculpted prose ripples into free verse in recollections of 1980s London, a bicoastal new millennium, and 2019/20: 

I could never find my car. Nonetheless, there was a glazed-over, confused pleasure in the driving, like waking up on a sunny morning late and realising that it’s a Saturday and dozing until the room is very bright and then going down into the kitchen and picking with a fork at cold chicken casserole. The silky layer of congealed fat. Then coffee.

*

I wanted all of it again to do again.
A grown-up spoon. A thumbnail
puncturing a daisy stem,
spare floppy disks, that silver
paper from fresh cigarettes.

Sullivan’s language thrills at the cellular level, as when she describes a grandmother’s “quick, realistic, very blue pair of eyes.” Her similes are uncannily apt: “blue nights done, handling a cock that never quite hardens, like a pastry chef whose hands are too warm.”

In “Tenants”: “My days contracted to a mile by pram. / Most mornings I spent in the pharmacy / Or nursing in the French patisserie.” Nearby was Grenfell Tower, a public housing high-rise flimsily constructed to save costs, which caught fire, killing over seventy residents. Sullivan’s speaker is fixated by Grenfell’s “crinkled, corrugated, lacy” façade:

All the mascara shades the drugstore has
From very black to blackest black black pearl
                                                new death is onyx.

A firefighter’s account is vibrant: “What I remember was the whiteness of the fire / A perfect whiteness.” Detached language and neuter pronouns render the inhabitants ghostly: “Soft hoses underfoot, one reached its hand / Snagged at my leg.” 

The restive, melancholy “Happy Birthday” sifts life’s lumber—Homer, a Berlin tryst, menopause factoids gleaned from Google Books—to yield a “little wedge of time / I’d spent on nothing much.” A faint refrain, “I wanted all of it again to do again,” unsettles the book’s composed surfaces. Sullivan has made Wordsworth’s rhetorical “Was it for this […]” bruisingly existential. We feel her dismay as time dribbles on.