The Readiness

Alan Gillis's The Readiness is a volume that moves fluently among various modes of poetic expression: the lyric, one of his most beautiful and assured; the gritty, one of his most familiar; and the comic, one of his most form-splitting. He can be darkly profound and lovingly comic, bitingly indicative, and compassionately pained. Gillis writes poems that measure our cultural morass with the love, pity, and sarcasm that it deserves. The volume is set in the terms Hamlet finally comes to at the end of the play: "There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow … the readiness is all." Gillis concludes: So make sure you're up to speed when, at sunset or dawn, worms vex the seed, crows shadow the corn. The shadowy threats that appear throughout the volume are met in "Late Spring" by how the beauty of "a green / world moves through // us in slow motion." They are also answered by the "quake" of recognition in a poem like "The Dote" that leaves the poet's "mind in the air." Yet, the darkness remains. We readers must also be ready, and, as the poet insists, we "know this, / the oncoming day, is nothing / but the night's brief parenthesis."