Scapegoat and Other Poems

Scapegoat and Other Poems displays the remarkable versatility of Alan Gillis’s voice, the range of his subjects, and the perspicacity of his poems. He moves from the popular to the political, from the satirical to the lyrical, with exceptional ease and insight. In “Progress,” “To Belfast,” “Laganside,” and “In the Shadow of the Mournes,” Gillis reveals, like Derek Mahon and Louis MacNeice before him, his ability to plumb the depths of the complicated society of Northern Ireland. In the title poem, Gillis captures the religious and political implications of a society that too long has looked to find a scapegoat for its woes. From his first published poem, “The Ulster Way,” he has turned social pressures back upon the self, exploring the limitations and possibilities of personal freedom: All this is in your head. If you walk, don’t walk away, in silence, under the stars’ ice-fires of violence, to the water’s darkened strand. For this is not about horizons, or their curving limitations. This is not about the rhythm of a songline. There are other paths to follow. Everything is about you. Now listen. Gillis can be scabrous and witty. Yet he also writes many tender and sometimes painful lyrics, as witnessed in these lines from “Approaching Your Two Thousand Three Hundred and Thirty-Third Night”: “If there is a heaven it is chained to the earth / like flight to the air, a mirror to light /air to the ground, rigor mortis to birth.” Often, the love lyric and the poem of angst at the state of the contemporary world unite in splendid fashion. The Scapegoat and Other Poems will soon establish Alan Gillis as a major force in Irish poetry for American readers.

Alan Gillis is from Belfast and now lives in Scotland, where he teaches English at The University of Edinburgh. He has published four poetry collections with The Gallery Press: 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 also been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize, and for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. In 2014 he was selected as a “Next Generation Poet” by the Poetry Book Society in the UK. As a critic, he is author of Irish Poetry of the 1930s (2005), and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012), both published by Oxford University Press, along with many essays on contemporary Irish and British poetry. From 2010–2015 he was editor of the Edinburgh Review.