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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.
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Rhapsodies 1831 (Paperback)
Petrus Borel; Translated by John Gallas, Kurt Ganzl
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R381
R308
Discovery Miles 3 080
Save R73 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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'Borel was the sun,' said Theophile Gautier, 'who could resist
him?' Indeed, who? A lycanthrope, necrophile, absurd revolutionary,
Paris dandy with a scented beard, flamboyant sufferer: a man with
no grave and no memorial. His once celebrated red mouth opened
briefly 'like an exotic flower' to complain of injustice and
bourgeois vulgarity; of his frustration in love and reputation; of
poverty and blighted fate. Then he withered in the minor
officialdom of Algeria, where he died because he would not wear a
hat, leaving a haunted house and a doubtful name. 'And now,' says
his only biographer Dame Enid Starkie, 'he is quite forgotten.'
Rhapsodies 1831 includes all the poems Borel wrote when he was
twenty and twenty-one. The poems, he said, are 'the slag from my
crucible': 'the poetry that boils in my heart has slung its dross'.
It is a fabulous, fiery, black-clouded dross: captains and
cutlasses, castles, maidens, daggers, danger; calls to arms,
imagined loves, plaints and howls of injustice. 'Never did a
publication create a greater scandal,' Borel said, 'because it was
a book written heart and soul, with no thought of anything else,
and stuffed with gall and suffering'. It was not reviewed. Now it
is back.
In The Little Sublime Comedy John Gallas reanimates one of the
great works of world literature for the twenty-first century.
Relocated from medieval Italy to modern-day New Zealand, Dante's
Divine Comedy is given a new lease of life in Gallas's darkly
funny, surreal adaptation. Discovered snoozing on a mountainside
above Lake Rotoiti, Mr Gallas - our millennial Dante - is taken
under the wing by his Horatian guide, one Samuel Beckett. Over the
course of 147 `songs' we accompany the pair on their journey
through the Bad Place, the Better Place and the Good Place, and
witness the horrors and delights that befall the dead. On our way
we encounter a skiing Pohutukawa Tree, a Golden Kiwi, Lineout the
dog, a Vegetable Ewe, souls falling off things, Philosophy, and
lots of bright, coloured lights. Divine order is replaced by modern
Physics, by Klein bottles, super-speeds and black holes. Gallas's
Comedy is a metaphysical plunge through torment and triumph, as
subtly satirical as it is unsubtly silly.
Clifford Harper illustrates John Gallas's ballad poem about the
life and times of the Italian anarchist Santo Caserio, a baker who
assassinated the French President, a little man who tried to change
things and got his head chopped off. The drawings are a homage to
the work of Frans Masereel, and accompany perfectly the ballad
verse. Agraphia is Harper's own publishing imprint, and as you'd
expect, the books are exquisitely designed, illustrated and
printed. Includes a biographical sketch, by Harper, of Caserio.
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