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    The Extasie
    The Extasie
    The Extasie
    Ebook86 pages26 minutes

    The Extasie

    By John Gallas

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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
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateJun 24, 2021
    ISBN9781800170865
    The Extasie
    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 in York, Liverpool, Upholland, Little Ness, Rothwell, Bursa, Leicester, Diyarbakir, Coalville and Markfield, as a bottlewasher, archaeologist, and teacher. His books are published by Cold Hub Press (nz) and Agraphia (Sweden), and The Little Sublime Comedy is his tenth Carcanet collection. He is the editor of two books of translations – 52 Euros and The Song Atlas – also published by Carcanet. He is a Fellow of the English Association and was 2016 Orkney St Magnus Festival poet.

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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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