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About this ebook
The Extasie is a compelling book of love poems with its lyrical roots deep in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the rural traditions of the nineteenth. Among New Zealand poet John Gallas's spirit guides are John Clare and, in particular, Wyatt and Donne, writers from our poetry's wittiest and most ecstatic age. But the book's heart is set firmly in the twenty-first century. Its two parts follow the seasons of a revelatory love through different weathers and forms. The poems follow the sequence of their composition, so we register the intimacies, forced separations, complexities and climaxes as on a lyrical fever chart. Things are never still or static, everywhere is growth and wonder - birds, tides, skies, trees, sheep, planets and flowers: a celebration of the natural world, and a seeing together. The eye of the poet is always turned to the world: how the world is seen and felt is a sufficient record of the partners' intimacy. Gallas's language is marked by vigorous verbs, arresting inversions, a world of process and mutation, of transformation about one constant belief. It is hard to find poetry so at ease and at home with the particular detail of rural England, of a Lincolnshire and Norfolk imbued with their own histories and a new-made sense of place.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherCarcanet Press Ltd.
Release dateJun 24, 2021
ISBN9781800170865
Author
John Gallas
John Gallas was born in New Zealand in 1950. He came to England in the 1970s to study Old Icelandic at Oxford and has since lived and worked throughout the UK as a bottlewasher, archaeologist, and teacher. His books are published by Cold Hub Press (NZ) and Agraphia (Sweden). The Extasie (2021) was his twelfth Carcanet collection. He also co-translated Rhapsodies 1831 by Petrus Borel, also published by Carcanet. Bill Manhire described him as 'the greatest New Zealand poet no one has ever heard of.' He currently lives in Leicestershire.
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Book preview
The Extasie - John Gallas
The
EXTASIE
JOHN GALLAS
CONTENTS
Title Page
One
The births of love
Freedestination
Paperboy
Sleep’s geography
Fit for glasses
Unconscious of it
Christmas in hospital
The air between
Old Hunstanton Beach
Once we stammered
When with fleshly bridges…
Operation all saints, East Norton
Gedney Drove End
Brancaster Beach
Did I never have a soul…
Taking your part
On Stanton Fields
Work
Poem on a bike
Sleep & be Donne
A walk away
A fear of something after death
When I stride along
B.L. Egerton 2711: Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem-book
The monument
The ravens
The sufi sheep
Niue
Langary Gate, October evening
Bombing practice
The little leaf that would not fall
Horse-eye, fox, and crow
Learning clouds
A whale in borrowed smalls
5.26 from Lincoln
And if you watch…
Today I choked…
Higher Darwinism
Lover in a storm
Portrait of Giovanni Gerolamo Grumelli – ‘The man in pink’
Love & sons
Two
The heartsease
The goose
Towards the black hole
Unlearning a view
Psalm 102
The dew-drop
A valediction of my face, in a window
Travelling light
Newton-in-the-Isle
The bearded angels of North Creake Church
I have chosen my heaven…
The lay of the land
82 degrees
Your fever
Bagworth Heath Wood
The sandals of T.E. Lawrence
Who hic shoot star?
Calf & hare
The stir
Plan for our death
Telegram tanka
About the Author
Copyright
THE EXTASIE
Mikey
ONE
THE BIRTHS OF LOVE
Begin
issue of a stout-slung sperm,
I went like clockwork till you came: unfruitful,
soft-mechanic and Blind Man’s Buff.
When I arrived (at nothing yet, because
it was not you), a small gold sovereign of small account,
ignorant of its kingdom and its currency,
I took you for a subject with my little fist,
banking on some notion, some credit on the unspent air,
drawn in an IOU, and showed you, unborn, mine.
In the end you came while I was busy,
long bones slipping out up to your eyes,
whose bulging shiners each bore my stamp,
minted in my mewling, hand-fast game.
All set then: though we knew, we had not met.
While twenty years of sturdy detour
took the necessary way to love, I did
some
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