NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

THE MOON AT MIDNIGHT contains 44 poems in its two sections as well as eight prefaces in the form of literary exchanges between an un-named professor of fine art and the writer R from July and September 2005. We are given no biographical information about Mr Sullivan, other than a listing of four previous publications, three in verse, and one prose work.

The prefaces seem to set out his literary pretensions in a reasonably erudite and entertaining way, but should a poet have to go to such lengths to set up his stall?

There are some good attempts at verse to be found in THE MOON AT MIDNIGHT though after a while the fact that most of the poems have an old fashioned and annoying rhyming construction begins to lessen their impact.

The McGonagall-esque rhymes of

	1942
	A steam train stopped
	In the silence of a summer's day
	And the loco smoke began to drift
	Across the meadow and the hay
	And the war was very far away
	...
	For love was not to come to me
	Until the turning of the century.

		Our Marriage Bed
	Remember the time we were alone
	In an inn of honey-coloured stone
	...
	And all day long we were together
	In that misty early Autumn weather
	...
	It was our unwed honeymoon
	And it was over far too soon
	...
	And I do believe that we are wed
	For in that room was our marriage bed.

NEW YEAR'S EVE 2004 has some evocative lines:

	And the year is moving on it's hinge
	And soon will swing into the past
	...
	The waiter asks me how I am?
	I lie and say that I am well
	...
	What have we done to reap
	Such loneliness as this?
	...
		... the poets always sing
	Of the pain that love alone can bring.

	I am alone and taking tea
	In a kind of mock gentility
	But remembering our own lost time:

	And all our loving ran to waste
	To be replaced by loneliness.

The collection MELANIE is divided into four Prefaces followed by two sections of poetry, Parts One and Two.

One of the great pleasures to be gained by Sullivan's poetry is the awareness that every poem, both singly and when placed together as a body of work, demonstrates a belief in the possibilities language has to truthfully and energetically communicate experience, thought and feeling. Sullivan does not distract the reader with inquiries into problems of subjectivity and textuality, and although the poems in this collection are innovative and exploratory, Sullivan speaks of life with clarity and wisdom. In this way his work appeals to a sense of shared experience and common history, and seeks to render contemporary the mythological function of poetry as a vehicle for insight; as a conduit between the individual and the common picture.

MELANIE is, therefore, an intriguing work, largely disconnected from the material and social emergencies we live with day to day. The Prefaces perform a gesture typical of such poetics. Echoing the scope of the book, they are written as letters to Melanie from R in which R expresses his love:

Only thought can be shown to exist and when thought is stilled, love flows in. (Preface 1).

Poetry is spiritual. Through it we briefly meet God, of whom we are in any case made." (Preface II).

This leads him to realise there is a deeper truth than he has so far uncovered, that he's only ever been half right, if never wholly wrong." (Preface III).

Inside is where it all happens. When thought is still, you leave time and enter here. It is a counter-cosmos entered through the mind, but more real than the diurnal planet of sea and stone.

Part One explores the theme that correspondence between lived experience and constellations of memory, concept and language can stimulate the revelation of thought and love. Sullivan's frequent references to love in this first section, suggests a broad sensitivity to the material limits of the way in which relationships grow. For instance, in the poem LOVE IN AGE IV, the woman says,

	You see the splinters in my soul,
	You see the shards that lacerate
	And the brokenness bequeathed by fate.
	Are you here to heal me and to mend?

	I need to heal the hurt in you
	or I too am wounded unto death.
	For you are my destination, and my end.

	so gently stroke my hand

	I'm in the arms of Love

	When the wound in me begins to heal
	Then I no longer shall conceal
	The love I feel for you

	What a perfect and a simple day:
	Tea and scones and you and I alone
	Above an unseen river in a hollow
	In green and timbered hills.

	Tell me what the future now will bring?
	When the nettle's dead it still can sting.

 	I am your quietness,
	the place where you belong.
	We are love, and love can do no wrong.

	And it's through the love between us two
	That we both know that it is true.
	We meet God when we make love.
	So. No, we can't again be merely friends.

	'Then straightway I knew
	There is the gift of art in you'

	Then you must repay the Giver
	by giving back the gift to all.

		October's ruin is on the hill
	And November's ruin marks us too
	In smaller and in bigger ways
	With the dying of our shorter days
	And the dying of the long decades.

	Love is the creator and what is made

	Mere wavelets on a deep blue sea.

	There is no knower,
	Only what is known;
	Thought without a thinker
	(Thought there is alone)
	But thought when stilled is love.

	Why leave a morning world
	For a world of mourning;
	Immortal life for war
	And mortal wife and dung
	And dying dogs on a rock
	Too short for horses?

 	Because human love is all there is:
	It is all our truth and all our bliss:
	And we can know no more than this.