By Way of Reply (2025)
By Way of Reply (2025) - Image 2
Maggie Sullivan

By Way of Reply (2025)

£12.00

By Way of Reply is the long-awaited third collection from Maggie Sullivan following her previously acclaimed poetry in Near Death (Domestic) (Tall Lighthouse, 2007) and the remote (Waterloo Press, 2013).

Sullivan’s work has been published in many magazines and journals in the UK and abroad, including: Smiths Knoll, RIALTO, Obsessed with Pipework, Nth Position (Canada), ORBIS, Room (Tonbridge Poetry competition anthology, 2006), Aesthetica, Magma Poetry, Long Islander Newspaper (USA), The Delinquent, the Shuffle Anthology (2007/08), City Lighthouse Anthology (Tall Lighthouse, 2009), and the Guernsey Arts competition – Poets on the Buses.

Before joining the Poetry Archive as Administrator in 2018, she has been a Trustee of the Poetry Society, and a mentor for the national literature development charity Survivors’ Poetry.

Sullivan is described as, “an author with a resonant imagination and sense of craft with poems which are witty, elemental and wise, extraordinarily considered explosions of sound and sense” – David Morley.

ISBN: 978-1-915241-12-2-1 Category: Tags: ,

Praise and Poems

“Some deem me impervious to all but the process.” Maggie Sullivan writes as a Returning Officer. But delight in subverting process is a hallmark of Sullivan’s casual flick of the metaphysical. Her brilliance in tiny constellations of hurt in a child, star nucleus of cancer in a sister, a woman aged 100, feeling differently “unfastened”; God seeking retirement, or AI seeking ours. In such tight nuclei incandescence bursts in laconic throwaway endings. Until the last quietly shattering section (of course tiny as a black hole) on Sullivan’s mother: “Believe it or not we would have settled for that.” And who is Fred, ghosting the machine? By Way of Reply is a stunning third collection: intimate, yet winkingly remote and durable as the Alexander Pope Epistle Sullivan invokes.

Waterloo Press

 

Maggie Sullivan’s By Way of Reply is a deftly crafted collection, depicting keenly observed snapshots of human experience, using “the best words in the best order” and tight but layered titles, literal and poetic ‘turns’, sound, rhythmic pacing, clear images, precise punctuation.., word-play and spacious stanza breaks that allow readers a pause — necessary after muscled lines that pack-a-(deceptive)-punch.

Celia A. Sorhaindo

 

Much of By way of Reply is wry observation about pointless street repairs, unfathomable technology, self-important capitalists and bureaucrats. These poems make me laugh, but they do not lose sight of how sad it is how much such absurdities take from us. So when Sullivan turns from these diversions to the conversations between love and mortality, despair and forgiveness that form the true script of our lives, all her poems take on only greater depth.

Richard Harrison

 

 

On Near Death (Domestic) (2007):

“…spare, memorable and often very funny as she negotiates storms worked up and the heart of the house in a manner akin to Alan Bennett”

Peter Carpenter, Worple Press

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