The Extasie | Paperback

The Extasie | Paperback Description

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 sequence the poems follow is that 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. Like other modern poets, Gallas reconstructs notions of identity and of gender, what it is that is all about love. Couplets, triplets, sonnets are here, but so light is the language, so unforced and enraptured, we hardly notice them though they provide the foundations of this visionary experience. It is also a book in which time's advance - failing sight, unavoidably wasted time, the nudging of dreams - accompanies sharpening vision; consolations of eternity and the discovery of happenstance, while astronomy and science feed and free the imagination. It is hard to find poetry so at ease and at home with the particular detail of rural England, of England informed by a sense of places, in particular Lincolnshire, imbued with its own histories.