In Coming Through, Rennie McQuilkin continues a series of books presenting poems written in day-by-day order. Eamon Grennan has this to say about the first of them, The Readiness: "Rennie McQuilkin's latest collection, is a wonder. With undaunted courage, insight and an always ready, irrepressibly generous humor even in the face of mortal illness, these poems are brief, brilliant testaments to the poet's stubborn will to praise, to celebrate the radiant ongoingness of the natural and human worlds that he has taken, it seems, into his care. In line after line - like bare willows / glowing from within - these poems inhabit the ordinary world in such a way (articulate, unshowy, practical, undeceived) as to reveal its mystery, the living spirit at the heart of it. Resisting any facile consolation, McQuilkin's poems show a startling and (for the reader) a reassuring cheerfulness of spirit, the sense that Nothing's not alive with possibility. With the shades of Dickinson and Hopkins alive behind it, The Readiness is a gift in itself for the richness of its simple, self-aware, undeceived humanity, its ability to look mortality in the face, and to find humour, even that, in what the worst can be. Part journal, part evensong, The Readiness is, in all its parts, all heart, full of grace."
