The Readiness

By Alan Gillis

Alan Gillis's The Readiness is a volume that moves fluently among various modes of poetic expression: the lyric, one of his most beautiful and assured; the gritty, one of his most familiar; and the comic, one of his most form-splitting. He can be darkly profound and lovingly comic, bitingly indicative, and compassionately pained. Gillis writes poems that measure our cultural morass with the love, pity, and sarcasm that it deserves. The volume is set in the terms Hamlet finally comes to at the end of the play: "There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow ... the readiness is all." Gillis concludes: So make sure you're up to speed when, at sunset or dawn, worms vex the seed, crows shadow the corn.The shadowy threats that appear throughout the volume are met in "Late Spring" by how the beauty of "a green / world moves through // us in slow motion." They are also answered by the "quake" of recognition in a poem like "The Dote" that leaves the poet's "mind in the air." Yet, the darkness remains. We readers must also be ready, and, as the poet insists, we "know this, / the oncoming day, is nothing / but the night's brief

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781943666447

Alan Gillis

Alan Gillis was born in Belfast. He teaches creative writing and modern and contemporary poetry at the University of Edinburgh, and has published four collections of his own poetry. The first, Somebody, Somewhere won the Strong Award for the best first collection in Ireland; Hawks and Doves was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Gillis also wrote Irish Poetry of the 1930s and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry with Fran Brearton. He was the editor of Edinburgh Review from 2010 to 2015.

Book preview

title page for The Readiness by Alan Gillis

First North American edition

© Alan Gillis, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

For permission, write to

Wake Forest University Press

Post Office Box 7333

Winston-Salem, NC 27109

wfupress.wfu.edu

[e-mail]

ISBN 978-1-930630-94-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-943666-44-7 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-943666-45-4 (mobi)

LCCN 2020940849

Cover design by Crisis

Publication of this book was generously supported by the Boyle Family Fund.

FOR

CIARAN CARSON

(HAPPY TO MEET, SORRY TO PART)

THE READINESS

It could happen at sunset

on a sloping lawn.

In a yawning estate

it could happen at dawn.

In a queue for your therapist,

in the public baths,

on a road through the forest

it could happen in a flash.

Under a harvest moon,

in a lift, on the stairs,

in an encrypted chatroom:

it could happen anywhere.

So make sure you’re up to speed

when, at sunset or dawn,

worms vex the seed,

crows shadow the corn.

BEFORE THE BUSTLE OF DAY

The creepy wrinkled crawly schlong of the earth-

worm squinches

through soil to ooze in dew, only to be pincered

in the beak of a crow,

lifted above the garden, the gable wall, into a sky

of porridge

with faint pools of blue, bewildered by the air—

as you inch, bleary head

from your bed, braced for that plunge into the cold

stir of day—

but then ow! the crow screws up, bites down and the worm

is snipped in two

falling back to soil, through which both sides wriggle

on their separate ways—

and you could swear one version of you slips

from your thin skin

as you step across the bedroom’s hard bare

floor to squiggle

back into the feathered duvet’s womb, curl in a ball

and vanish there.

It is morning, this your morning song, your dreams

gone, packed up

in a past yet to come. Draw the blinds, your estate

is having its lid lifted.

A hybrid car ohms past and hurts the air

less while your

neighbour slinks