Many of the poems in Hawks and Doves are in transit, by car or by foot, coming or going, their personae wondering ‘what to do, who to be, the way things are’. They shift swiftly, but uneasily, between what’s outside the door and what’s on-screen: between Belfast with its processes of ‘normalization’, and a wider world riven by conflict, poverty and environmental havoc. Many deal with families, parenthood and responsibility — with the hawks and doves that circle the home, the heart, and the head. Exuberant love poems mingle with scabrous parodies of self-satisfied apathy and masculine aggression. In their formal virtuosity, linguistic incandescence and imaginative intelligence, these poems are deeply affecting and often searing examinations of the world in which we’re living. Ending with major pieces that traverse the waste and beauty of our time, Hawks and Doves is an unforgettable trip.

A Uniquely Contemporary Talent

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.

— Selina Guinness, The Irish Times 1 September 2007