The Extasie

by John Gallas

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781800170858
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	06/24/2021
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

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, Diyarbakır, Coalville and Markfield, as a bottlewasher, archaeologist and teacher. He is the editor of two books of translations - 52 Euros and The Song Atlas - and ten previous collections of his own poetry, all published by Carcanet. He is a Fellow of the English Association and was 2016 Orkney St Magnus Festival poet.

Table of Contents

1

The births of love 7

Freedestination 9

Paperboy 10

Sleep's geography 11

Fit for glasses 12

Unconscious of it 13

Christmas in hospital 14

The air between 15

Old Hunstanton Beach 16

Once we stammered 17

When with fleshly bridges… 18

Operation all saints, East Norton 19

Gedney Drove End 20

Brancaster Beach 21

Did I never have a soul… 22

Taking your part 24

On Stanton Fields 26

Work 27

Poem on a bike 28

Sleep & be Donne 30

A walk away 31

A fear of something after death 32

When I stride along 33

B.L. Egerton 2711: Sir Thomas Wyatt's poem-book 34

The monument 35

The ravens 36

The sufi sheep 37

Niue 38

Langary Gate, October evening 39

Bombing practice 40

The little leaf that would not fall 42

Horse-eye, fox, and crow 43

Learning clouds 44

A whale in borrowed smalls 45

5.26 from Lincoln 46

And if you watch… 47

Today I choked… 48

Higher Darwinism 49

Lover in a storm 50

Portrait of Giovanni Gerolamo Grumelli - 'The man in pink' 51

Love & sons 52

2

The heartsease 55

The goose 57

Towards the black hole 58

Unlearning a view 59

Psalm 102 60

The dew-drop 61

A valediction of my face, in a window 62

Travelling light 63

Newton-in-the-Isle 64

The bearded angels of North Creake Church 66

I have chosen my heaven… 67

The lay of the land 68

82 degrees 69

Your fever 70

Bagworth Heath Wood 72

The sandals of T.E. Lawrence 73

Who hic shoot star? 75

Calf & hare 78

The stir 80

Plan for our death 81

Telegram tanka 82