The Extasie

John Gallas

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800170865
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

5

ONE

6

7

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 detour8

took the necessary way to love, I did

some things of little profit, little note and little worth,

as notice to your solvency made flesh,

and things to come. I knew that I would profit well,

but not yet how, from your impression lent,

now you were not nothing anymore.

And I surprised you at first sight in Summer’s

matching Snap, with liquid coin, which was

our fortune: to weep, recognising wonder.

9

FREEDESTINATION

So say we had no choice: that we were made

with holes each other’s sizes, absences

the shapes of things to come,

to steer the star-coursed ship as if we did,

and pick our fated ends,

which are the hearts’ intent.

So come on, let’s try our proofs again,

and argue out, in beastly type,

their published, faint philosophies:

come on, let’s press again our Complete Works

to sound the sheeted plagiary of Heaven

with tenses, both the doing and the done.

So say we prove both sides, and double find,

when I fit you, and you are all full-filled.

10

PAPERBOY

I rack my brain by stock and stook

to write your athanasic Rights;

I drag Invention up and down

clod and farrow bump bump bump

to ink you into Permanence: and I rehearse,

behind dull harvest...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• One
• Two
• About the Author
• Copyright