Poetry:Alan Gillis won the Rupert and Eithne Strong First Book Award in 2005 for his collection, Somebody, Somewhere. His debut was remarkable for its punch-drunk language, for its formal dexterity and for Gillis's sheer glee at the variety of references a single line could be made to contain.
The big question was whether his follow-up would shake off the presence of Ciaran Carson, to whom he is indebted for the long punning lines and a Belfast demotic which mixes the paramilitary and the mundane. It doesn't quite, but the question is becoming less important.
These poems stage a verbal crash of pop culture, the globalised capitalism it serves, and the defiantly and problematically local embodied in nonce words and dialect. A country walk in The Mournes begins "Our heads plunged deep in BlackBerries," before putting technology aside for pastoral: "we lose the city for the russet rills/ and quiet of those heather-shagged mounds,/ hunked and fallen crags that ruck and reel,/ hollow and heave like the incredible body/ of nobody living." The innuendo of "heather-shagged" points to the comic machismo that extends beyond content and tone to Gillis's Don Juan rhymes (favourites include "bark-stripped trees" and "Bacardi Breezer"; "Lexus" and "Texas"; "Fuhrer" and "angostura"). Typically his double sestina features dreams of Emmanuelle Béart, while the rhyming couplets of Bob the Builder is a Dickhead cite as their anti-hero the Fat Controller from Thomas the Tank Engine.
Since these poems can crack a joke, they risk being underestimated. While the hurly-burly of Gillis's compound adjectives, lists of synonyms and endless puns can seem best appreciated in individual set pieces, the references between poems across the collection demonstrate a more complex plot. To my mind, the less cluttered his lines become, the more Gillis's talents come to the fore, even as he acknowledges other masters (Michael Longley is a tender antagonist in several).
A Blueprint for Survival, There and Death by Preventable Poverty are each very powerful poems. In conclusion, Laganside finds Gillis adopting a wise credo for thriving on the real streets of Belfast's literary village: "Of course, this happens all the time: you walk/ up to your neighbour and note his nostril/ hairs, dimples, pocks, scars, cheeks and creviced/ chin; then five minutes later you catch his nut-/ brown eyes in the light and all the features/ of his face fuse into something whole but shifting/ like this river . . ." Hawks and Doves shows that process of literary fusion to be developing into a uniquely contemporary talent.
Similarly urban in his themes, The Present Writer (one of two poems so titled) presents Nick Laird as an exile from the tabernacles of rural Ulster, trying to obliterate memories of "fraudulent" worship through immersion in the secular world of London. Although the tasks and consolations afforded by faith are repeatedly rejected throughout On Purpose, this heritage is deeply imprinted on both Laird's vocabulary and his moral vision. This is a poet who mulls over the arbitrary replacement of a Gideon Bible by Autotrader and Lonely Planet Guide to China in his hotel room, occasioning a pilgrimage nonetheless: " . . . Over there/ they are eight hours ahead// so it must be approximately dawn/ in the Forbidden City,/ where something might evade the guides/ already at the entrance,// might glide right past the lion-dogs/ on guard, asleep in bronze,/ might fire the dew on the golden tiles,/ ignite each phoenix on its ridge.// Light." (The Hall of Medium Harmony)
The quest for religious abjection is explored in Everyman, That Hunting is a Holy Occupation and Dissent. Away from its theological roots, this identification with the outcast informs a powerful Holocaust poem based on the diary of one of the liberators of Bergen-Belsen (Lipstick). These lines give sudden meaning to the numbers which seem, sometimes randomly, to figure in almost every poem: 'One had to get one's mind trained to the idea// that an individual did not count. That was the thing:/ one knew five hundred souls a day were dying/ and that five hundred souls a day were going// to go on falling dead for weeks, before anything/ that we could do would have the least effect." This broader political awareness denies Laird any easy consolation, while also requiring restraint. Two poems that revisit the Troubles, Conversation and Scouts, slip into melodrama and are too reminiscent of early Muldoon. In contrast, Posture of Army profitably offers an Ulster motto, "ENEMIES DEFINE YOU/ BETTER/ THAN YOUR FRIENDS" as a sardonic comment on marriage. Perhaps because he can make me delight in a pug dog, I feel that Laird is not really a natural ironist ("you with the prize-winning ears,/ who grew from a glove/ to moccasin slipper . . . your weapon of choice is the sneeze" - Pug). The most memorable of his lyrics are those in which the romantic sublime takes wing (The Nine Varieties of Ground and Light Pollution are terrific) or is grounded by a self-critical vulnerability (The Underwood No 4). On Purpose shows a keen poetic intelligence continuing to develop its range.
Selina Guinness's anthology, The New Irish Poets, was published by Bloodaxe in 2004
Hawks and Doves By Alan Gillis The Gallery Press, 77pp. €18.50hb/ €11.95pb On Purpose By Nick Laird Faber, 65pp. £9.99