Over Here

In Over Here, Alan Gillis reveals surreal intersections of mind and world, neither of which are stable: “ For the mind is the sea, / the mind is mountains, rivers, and the great earth / moving and suspended until it’ s not.” If Gillis’ s poems feel like a high-wire act, they remain grounded, conscious of the threat of a brutal fall. Violence is often at the edges, as are anxieties of climate change, the staggering death toll of the pandemic, toxic masculinity, and internet trolls. Still, humor is a staple in this volume: “ my head and backbone / through demonic consubstantiation, / are now seventy-five percent smartphone.” Equally attentive to pastoral possibility and our digital reality, to poetic form and even the poetic use of emojis, Gillis answers angst with an abundant hope— in language, in nature, and their intermingling intricacies: It’ s hard to be anything other than a doomster, but we’ re lifted by the swooshed pines of this woodland, in and out of our minds, its comedy of squirrels, moss-bed squelch, ladybird throng.

Alan Gillis was born in Belfast and currently lives in Scotland, where he is Professor of Modern Poetry at The University of Edinburgh. His other books with Wake Forest University Press are The Readiness (2020) and Scapegoat and Other Poems (2016), which includes selections from his previous volumes published by The Gallery Press in Ireland: Scapegoat (2014), Here Comes the Night (2010), Hawks and Doves (2007), and Somebody, Somewhere (2004), which won the Strong Award for Best First Collection in Ireland. He has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and for the Irish Times Poetry Award.