“One soft kiss” in a derelict world

The paper focuses on the contemporary Irish poet Alan Gillis’s latest collection, The Readiness, with special attention paid to “Metropolis” and “Vespers,” two long poems that come in the latter part of the volume. In them, the pressures of late modernity, which are thematised throughout The Readiness, are given sustained attention, revealing loneliness and dereliction as the most excruciating aspects of an individual’s life. While the bleak perspective on late modern existence is characteristic of Gillis work to date, I show that the poems included in this collection, each in its own distinct way, discover relief from the alienation in the establishment of meaningful relationships with other people.