In his Picador debut, Alan Gillis – one of the most admired Irish poets of his generation – addresses some of the most pressing concerns of the age: how can we live at the centre of our contemporary paradox, disconnected and hyper-connected as we are?
A poet of thresholds and crossings, Gillis finds his answers in the suburbs and edgelands, at the hesitation before the doorstep or the gate. The Readiness sites itself at the heart of our human contradictions, and explores their meaning. These poem form a series of bad dreams and clear visions that speak to the chaos and fragility of both self and society: the childhood innocence that persists into the resignation of adulthood; the beauty of nature in an age of environmental ruin; the terrible isolation of contemporary life – and the live-streamed, advert-laden over-wiring that springs from its digital commons. It does this with a formal confidence, a dry wit and often astonishing lyricism that marks Gillis as one of the most individual and vital poetic voices now at work. 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 (2007), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Gillis co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (OUP, 2011) with Fran Brearton; OUP also published his Irish Poetry of the 1930s in 2005. He was the editor of Edinburgh Review from 2010 to 2015. An individual and dryly witty poetry collection by one of the most brilliant poetic voices from Ireland.
