In the footsteps of the master

If Tom Paulin had a production credit on Big Brother, chances are the resulting household would bear a strong resemblance to The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry on Belfast’s University Road. The handsome terrace has been salvaged from low-level dereliction in order to house some of the North’s most interesting writers – providing office-space for a host of dramatists, poets, novelists and academics.
Anyone, however, expecting some telegenetic in-house divisions (for example: pro and anti- Field Day factions glaring at one another across the hot tub) would soon be reaching for the remote control.
According to Alan Gillis, happy tenant and recently published poet, the Heaney Centre is an oasis of creative serenity.
“It’s a great place,” he says, nursing a coffee in the room he’s been assigned for the summer. “Ciaran Carson is down the hall, Daragh Carville and Glenn Patterson are around, Sinead Morrissey is upstairs and Leontia Flynn will be taking over this office at the beginning of autumn.
“There’s a fully-stocked modern poetry library, a seminar room and space for visiting writers. There’s also a nice garden where you can have a barbecue and talk crap about football and films. It’s pretty amazing – almost like a little enclave.”
That Gillis finds himself in this position is something of a surprise to the man himself. Far from being a long term fanatic of the gilded generation of (Ulster poets) McGuckian, Longley, Heaney, Mahon, Muldoon and Carson, he claims to be a fairly recent convert to the cause of Northern poetry.
“Maybe it comes down to how they are taught at school but I had a very negative view of Northern Irish poetry,” he explains. “I had that GCSE perception of Heaney, that it was all about fields and frog-spawn and 'Norn Iron'. But once you start reading them all properly, you see that’s not the case at all – that they’re actually more concerned with not being circumscribed in a boring cultural space, that it was risky and had things to say about the modern world.
"With Carson and Paul Muldoon especially, I could see that they were influenced by the same kind of funky American poetry that excited me.
"They seemed to be rebelling against the notion that Northern Ireland was this place apart from the modern world – their poetry showed that it was actually very much part of the world.”
If, over the last 20 years, Muldoon and Heaney have provided the two dominant poetic templates in the North (one trickily post-modern, fluid and urban; the other earth-bound, contemplative and essentially rural), Gillis’ debut collection, Somebody, Somewhere, leaves little doubt that it was written in the city.
Some poems lurch around like drunks – eyeballing you menacingly, before throwing a heavy arm around your shoulder and crying on your collar – while others are as dense and quick to disperse as exhaust fumes.
But while Gillis obviously draws much energy from his environment, he’s keen to stress that bad-boy lit isn’t his bag – Someday, Somewhere is, essentially, a work with excellent table manners.
“I was actually worried that it was overtly-bookish,” he admits. “The poem ‘Last Friday Night’ which is written in a kind of Tom Leonard-y, swearing, Belfast vernacular – it’s actually structured in Spenserian stanzas. I was working in a factory at the time surrounded by these really hard blokes and, like a prick, was reading The Faerie Queen during my lunch-breaks.
“So, while there’s a lot of fuck this, fuck that going on, it never wanders that far off from being geekish.”
Gillis is planning to use the next few months hammering into shape the poems that will make up his second collection. Already, he sees themes emerging. As a resident of an area of Belfast where, over recent years, the rate of racist attacks has exploded, he has found this tension being reflected in his writing.
“I have a young son and although it’s an old cliché, it’s true – you feel incredibly angry at how crap the world is after you’ve brought this incredibly beautiful being into it.
“I popped out to my backyard for a fag last night and all the murals, the flags – it just hit me: what the fuck am I doing bringing a kid up in this? It’s quite hard to write about things that make you angry, but the first poem I’ve written this year is pretty much about what I see out my window every night.
“I work in Coleraine and when I go up there I sometime have to get the 6.40am train. It’s always packed with this amazingly mad babble of different accents and languages and you watch them get off at Ballymena, Ballymoney, Portrush and just think – good luck.”
Photograph by Amberlea Trainor