Gamble, Miriam

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     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      "Amen, but": Review of Alan Gillis’s Here Comes The NightCitation for published version:Gamble, M 2012, '"Amen, but": Review of Alan Gillis’s Here Comes The Night' Irish University Review, vol42, no. 1.Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Publisher final version (usually the publisher pdf)Published In:Irish University ReviewPublisher Rights Statement:© Gamble, M. (2012). "Amen, but": Review of Alan Gillis’s Here Comes The Night. Irish University Review, 42(1)General rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 20. Feb. 2015Book ReviewsAlan Gillis, Here Comes the Night. Oldcastle: Gallery, 2010. 104 pages.GBP 10.50.Here Comes the Night is Alan Gillis’s third collection, and the first tomark Scotland, both literary and literal, as a presence in his work.Although many poems pointedly locate themselves within an Irishcontext, invoking, among others, Van Morrison, Sheridan Le Fanu andU2 (even ‘Whiskey’ goes the Irish way), his adopted city of Edinburghmakes repeated appearances. And, at a deeper level, so do the greatsof Scottish literature. This is not to suggest we have ‘lost Gillis toScotland’; merely to note that there are new forces at play, and thatmany of them take their cue from tropes and ideas prominent in bothrecent and canonical Scottish writing.Gillis has always been a poet with a pronounced and vocal socialconsciousness, a trait more common to Scottish poetry than to Irish. Butit’s psychologically that Scotland really makes its mark, and particularlyin the concept of the double. Traceable through Don Paterson (of whomGillis is a perceptive critic) back to writers like Stevenson and JamesHogg, the double or alter-ego forms a rich seam in modern Scottishliterature, challenging the rigidities of identity formation and theperceived barriers between, for example, reason and the irrational,progress and archaism. Here Comes the Night is a book haunted bydoubles and doublings back. Many of the poems occupy liminal spaces(the beach, dawn, dusk) and take as their subject irresolvable paradoxesand unanswerable questions. ‘Dream’ meets ‘real’, substance shadowand form chaos, each proving tainted by and inextricable from the veryother or opposite against which it hopes to self-define.One of the most persuasive doublings exists in relation to definitionitself, which throughout the book is associated with the impulse of artand is sought and shunned in equal measure. The sonnet ‘Eloquence’courts linguistic perfection, the ‘dead-eyed accuracy’ of a metaphorical‘plunge’ into ‘the ice-shock deep’ from which the poet would resurface‘with a glittered life writhing in the beak’. Likewise, ‘Prelude’commences with the desire ‘to reach within, / clear the clutter anddiscover / your exact life, the real thing’. However, the poem fails todeliver on its goal, instead taking the speaker on a surreal journeyIrish University Review 42.1 (2012): 170–212Edinburgh University Press# Irish University Reviewwww.eupjournals.com/iur170through the mirror of dream or art (or both) which leads only to afrustrating urge to return to the start point. ‘Something else’ isdiscovered during its course, but it isn’t perfection or the demonstrable‘real thing’ that’s wooed at the outset. Indeed, althoughphantasmagoric, the vision isn’t even separated from the world of‘clutter’ from which it’s designed to escape. Rather, the speaker findshimself ‘stranded / at a party where people wear Sarah Palin / plasticmasks’; ‘the violence within’ mimics and warps ‘the violence without’rather than offering desirable alternatives.If this sounds complicated, that’s because it is: Gillis’s are difficultpoems, and they inhabit territories of confusion and contradiction. Thesonnet sequence is a form designed to argue with itself – across itsrange, ideas are endlessly tested, chewed over, rebutted and reworked(though rarely resolved). There are three sonnet sequences in HereComes the Night, all broadly concerned with the notion of answeringquestions. In ‘Approaching Your Two Thousand Three Hundred andThirty-Third Night’, Gillis attempts to satisfy his son on the subject ofthe purpose of life. In ‘The Green Rose’, a hen-pecked farmer joins up inthe hope of finding purpose (instead he finds, first, Walt Whitman, whoonly confuses him further, and, second, death). And in ‘In Whose BlentAir All Our Compulsions Meet’ a troubled couple ‘take the air’ in theattempt to grasp their relation to one another, pin-point their exact placeon the marital trajectory. Like many poems in the book, ‘In Whose BlentAir’ is both a failed ‘quest’ and an undecided tussle between thewarring opposites of determinism and individual self-determination.Humans have many analogues in Here Comes the Night – army ants, ratsand, in this case, wrens, which are alternately ‘buffeted’ by the whim ofthe wind and capable of ‘breaking free’, ‘sweeping the breadth / andbuffets of the sky’ on their own terms. Characteristically, the poemdoesn’t decide which state is dominant, but weighs and worries at both.The fifth sonnet concludes, ‘Sometimes it doesn’t help knowing / thereis more than one way of going’. However, it’s precisely this crisis orschism that animates the book at large, and through which Gillisexplores his ethics of and relationship with language, which (as itshould be) is at the heart of everything he writes.Language is a slippery medium in the fifth sonnet of ‘In Whose BlentAir’. The traditional defining marks of Northern Irish culture – ‘Votefor Sinn Fein’, ‘Fuck the Pope’, ‘God is good’ – are warped and erodedso that they still make ‘sense’, but not the sense intended:‘Vote for Sin’, ‘Fuck the Pop’, ‘God is go’Language, one might say, is less an unreliable guide, here, than areliable guide to unreliability, but also something from which meaningBOOK REVIEWS171continues to be sought. Likewise, in ‘Down Dark and EmptyingStreets’, questions receive answers, but answers to or statements ondifferent questions:she says Hey there,in her clown voice, is that a spannerin yer works? under the twenty-foothigh frown of an Ulster Says No banner‘Eloquence’ goes further, positing a ‘tax’ on supposed linguistic puritythrough the image of a diving bird that enters an oil slick:there’d be some dark slick of pitch to taxsuch flight, and I’d splutter, coast-bound and waxedThe concepts of ‘tax’ and ‘spluttering’ suggest that (for poet if notbird) the punishment is self-imposed, and that ‘gicked’ is (againfor poets, not for birds) a better state to be in in a world whereeloquence is often culpable and should perhaps be literally charged.Gillis’s attitude to music (and the music of metrical language) bearsthis out – despite the collection’s title – as does his doubleappropriation and interrogation of Ian Paisley’s speech on theopening of the Northern Irish Assembly in 2007. Paisley quotedfrom Ecclesiastes 3, ‘A time to [black], a time to [white]’. ‘If There wasTime All Day to Wait’ and ‘Graduation Day’ repeat the job, but, by re-contextualizing, invert the content with savage irony. In ‘GraduationDay’, ‘a time to get and a time to lose, / a time to keep and a time tocast away’ is addressed to ‘those in closing down offices and dolequeues / who watch these graduates stream into bars’. And in ‘If Therewas Time All Day to Wait’, an elegy, it’s directed back on Paisleyhimself:Someone should say tothe Big Man: ‘Hallelujah. Amen, and about timetoo. But what was wrong in ’69 or ’72?Too bad for everyone who’s had tobear him out, too bad for – what did he callthem? – the honoured and unageing deadSuddenly, it doesn’t seem like calling time – or calling anything –should be so easy. ‘Dead-eyed’ accuracy gains its resonance at far toohigh a price; true accuracy (which has more to do with context andaddressee than timeless rhetoric, and may not be so tidy) is a muchmore difficult game.IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW172

"Amen, but": Review of Alan Gillis’s Here Comes The Night

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