The Early Days of This by Jacqueline Sullivan

Jacqueline Sullivan’s startling collection juxtaposes what Elizabeth Bishop called the art of losing—remnants, distances, absences, an elegy “in place of” a funeral, incomplete dates carved upon a gravestone—with the renewal offered by the natural world. “Raggedy tendrils” of yellow forsythia, “daffodils at prayer,” robins, swallows, and a “reappearing bluebird” bring comfort and a sense of connectedness. Her chapbook explores this theme with wry, understated sonnet structures, subtle rhymes, and surprising lines that take you unawares: “how before/ time passed everything was/ a beginning,” how “yesterday’s a door half-open.” Each poem is alive with freshly observed details. Sullivan tells us, indeed, that any depiction of what is lost should include something as small as “a sparrow, tiny and dark, [. . .] so even if no one is watching there will still be a witness.”

–Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities, College of the Holy Cross

“before/ time passed everything was/ a beginning…” and so it is with the world of Jacqueline Sullivan’s chapbook collection The Early Days of This. These poems resonate with flowers, birds, memory, and art, all transient and necessary to the poet and her family. Evoking religious iconography, or a print of Bonnard, or the words of Pushkin, or the student poet’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Sullivan holds the caught image examined from where it arrived to where it is let go. The poet pays reverent attention to what is present, a nephew mowing the lawn who “could have been micro-tiled in Rome,” or her mother’s “jet-black hair …let go as white as marble.” Tender and heartbreaking, these poems ask us to look with care because life is beautiful and all too brief.

–Carol Hobbs, author of New-found-land

Jacqueline Sullivan’s poems help us see the mystical, the magical, and the mythic in everyday events. For example, she convinces us that a neighbor struggling with the heavy root ball of a tree he’s planting is actually “Sisyphus” with his “burlap captive”. She transforms ordinary biscuits cooking on a cast iron frying pan into “ships bumping about on a black sea” turning into “color and puff, curved and amber-chested.” These poems are quiet, musical, watchful, filled with fresh air, and bound to delight.

–Grey Held, author of Two Star General