All summer the Park smelled of cloves and it was dying.
Now it is Labor Day and you have been sleeping through a rainstorm,
Half aware of the sewage and frying peanut oil and the ozone
Rising in the morning heat, and the sound of your roommate hooking the chain,
Flipping ice cubes into a brandy balloon, pouring juice over them,
Ruby Sanguinello, till they giggle, popping their skins. The freezer throbs.
The three poems in Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems are all among my favourite poems of the last quarter century, so it’s hard to raise one above the others. But I’ll go with the opener, “You, Very Young in New York”, which was also the first to be written, because it has the un-selfconscious excitement one often finds in a writer’s early work, as well as the intelligence and sheer good writing that distinguishes the whole book. This, despite the fact that its subjects include a precocious kind of disillusionment. Terrific. – Andrew Motion
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