52 Euros

Gallas John

John Gallas, who guided us around the world in his celebrated anthology "The Song Atlas", here zooms in on Europe. The poems he perfects in English are chosen from the work of the famous (Akhmatova, Baudelaire, Pasolini) and the still-to-be known (the Olafsson brothers, Renee Vivien, Yulia Zhadovskaya). Native speakers provide him with literals and the poems' sounds. Gallas then "re-poems" them. They constitute an exhilarating poetic journey across a continent and through time. All human life is here: love and despair, excess and wild wistful calm. Gallas understands the many musics of language. His book is a trove of the purest currency of Europe, poetry.

About the Author

John Gallas was born in 1950 in Wellington, New Zealand. He came to England in 1971 to study Old Icelandic at Oxford, and stayed. He has worked for many years as a teacher with the Leicestershire Behaviour Support Team. He has published ten collections of poetry with Carcanet Press and edited the anthology of world poetry "The Song Atlas" (2002). Swims like a fish, cycles like a windmill.

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