Review: The Devil’s Fools by Mary Gilliland

Mary Gilliland’s new poetry collection, The Devil’s Fools (Codhill Press), is faster than a speeding time machine, moving the reader from the days of Greek and Roman myths to the present and back again in less time than it takes to read a fifteen-line free-verse lyric. Take, for example, the poem “Proserpine,” one of my favorites. The speaker, using language so contemporary it would not be uncomfortable on Twitter, says, “I fell in with a man from a small country / He stopped on a rainy lane and asked did I want a ride.” This new telling puts a modern twist on the old myth. No helpless victim, Proserpine almost controls her destiny.

Gilliland’s previous collections are Gathering Fire and a chapbook, The Ruined Walled Castle Garden. The Devil’s Fools,which won the 2021 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award, is a long-awaited second full-length collection, and it will not disappoint. The poems range far in subject matter and vary in form. In addition to Proserpine, you will meet Odysseus, who speaks his own story as he returns to a wife described as “the face / without an adventure / to which I was wedded.” You will meet Dionysus, Cain, Lizzie Borden, a blackbilled cuckoo, and a dog day harvestfly “outgreening the grass.” You will meet the poet’s parents and siblings and loves and spouse, and, most importantly, you will meet the poet herself, a presence in every poem. Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, she is a part of all she has met.

In the something-completely-different category, you will also meet an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Gilliland has included three poems written as a response to the 2001 epidemic in the UK. I found the first of these, “Midlothian,” most eerily relevant to our own pandemic experience, with its “field-long graves” and farmer suicides. In her notes—yes, there are two pages of helpful notes at the end of the book—Gilliland tells us that 4,000,000 animals were slaughtered in the UK during 2001. Animals, not people, but the mood is not unfamiliar as “townsfolk / and villagers roll towels, stuff thresholds, lintels, jambs.”

Scattered among reimagined myths are nature poems, love poems, elegies, and family poems. Take, for example, these lines from the poem “Synergy”:

                        To marry is to commit an act of
lunacy that nobody should wish on
you but always does, is to like angels
carve the firmament.

 Or these from “She Wanted My Hearts the Same Way”:

                        She once said of the boys their equipment is exposed,
such a vulnerable way to go through life.

                        She tumbled me the way the waves do seastones.
                        Me then nine others, eight of us full term.

I think “Drenched” is one of the strongest poems in this collection. Here, in two-line stanzas, reasons for drinking are played against descriptions of waves in the ocean, a day at the beach, driving in traffic, more waves. “I drank to knock out the ego,” it begins and soon accelerates to higher stakes and a powerful ending. This poem alone is worth the price of the book.

The centerpiece, a long poem titled “Among the Trees,” almost dances across its pages, sometimes zigzagging and at one point splitting into columns. A complicated, intimate, elusive love poem, it moves between houses and gardens, from a Sunday swim to a borrowed bed to a houseboat, suggesting questions that are not asked outright. Does marriage start “with a veil”? Does it start “with a hammer and a credit card”? This poem deserves more than one reading. In fact, all the poems inThe Devil’s Fools, Mary Gilliland’s thoughtfully accomplished, resonant, deeply felt volume, deserve multiple readings. This book will stay with you.