A hybrid new collection from the author of Three Poems—about 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...

Hannah Sullivan's debut collection is a revelation - three poems of startling intensity, ambition and length. Though each poem stands apart, their inventive and looping encounters make for a compelling unity. 'You, Very Young in New York' is a study of romantic possibility and disillusion in a great American city. 'Repeat Until Time' begins with a move to California and unfolds into a philosophical essay on repetition. 'The Sandpit After Rain' explores the birth of a child and the loss of a father with exacting clarity. Readers will experience her work with the same exhilaration as they might the great modernising poems of Eliot and Pound, but with the unique perspective of a brilliant new female voice.