Praise and Poems

Aesop couldn’t frame it better. the remote also extends the familial, more purely domestic politics in near death {domestic} to a politics dealing in wider contemporary issues of power versus representation, to reach beyond the increasingly reductive world we create; but still retaining the dark, sharp humour which characterises her work and the craft of creating poetry. Thus How to build a poem ends: ‘Use patience, / press surface to surface / until the stones find their own grip, / near and far all at once. // Be bold, choose big stones.’ As you’d expect from such hearkening, there’s an abundance of tender, appalled poems on childhood, fragile parents, too-early
toughened children.

There’s much, (even if obliquely) referencing current financial and social policymaking by a largely wealthy, largely privileged cohort who’ll never have to feel the effects. Therefore, poems encapsulating Sullivan’s meditations on the power/ representation axis include a tough new thread: Greeting, Aragon Tower, Deptford, Pie, Passport, Hundred Acre Wood revisited. Thus in the latter: ‘Official notice — // presumption in favour / of sustainable development. // Those are very big words thinks Pooh, / and look what’s happened muses Eyore, / Tigger running riot with a chainsaw, / Rabbit’s pink nose bloodied.’ Sullivan scrutinizes the rhetoric here of a re-invention of the Victorian: a panoptic, highly objective and detached surveillance culture, increasingly prescriptive and controlling. With Sullivan we revisit a road to debt serfdom never envisaged by Hayek, but seen by her as totemic of all forms of oppression, hyper-capitalist, totalitarian and worse. Sullivan’s is a major voice and the remote, hugely anticipated, exceeds even her readers’ expectations.

Free fall

Years of practice,
worktop to kitchen floor,
shed roof to patio,
next, a leap from half way up a tree,
landing on grass fortunately.
Dad never mowed the lawn again.

When you jumped
from the eighth floor of a tower block
we were just in time with a mattress.

Addictive, lengthening the drop;
we advised Bungee Jumping,
the reassurance of elastic.

Fully fledged,
we bought you a parachute,
best silk, costly,
slippery as your fingers –
blame the ripcord.