Somebody Somewhere won the 2004 Rupert and Eithne Strong Award for Best First Collection
‘The first time I looked into Alan Gillis’s poetry, I was completely taken by it. Even though there was so much to take in at first glance, I was immediately hooked by its linguistic exuberance, its intelligence, its black humour, its sometimes zany flights of imagination that are grounded in an emotional reality. Belfast features in many of these poems, but it is not a conventional ‘Troubles’ landscape. Here, the city is a state of altered consciousness, reeking of desperate late-night parties, the drink-and-drug-clouded boundaries that join and separate its protagonists. Yet the poems are often gloriously funny, formally brilliant, jinking deftly between streetwise talk and mordant rhetoric. Somebody Somewhere is one of the best books of poetry I have read for some time.’ — Ciaran Carson
‘The immediate strength of this collection is in the taut eloquence of the phrasing . . . Gillis is a poet of many modern images, from advertising and apparently science-fiction. He is macho and slick. He writes of adjusting his balls. He is urban and brash but there are moments reached after his deft displays when a reader must gasp or be silent, much as you might after watching a dancer do something impossible with gentle grace. You might even appreciate it enough not to notice him smirking at you.’ — Malachi O’Doherty, Fortnight
