This collection of 200 tankas has no Great Purpose, apart from explaining the Meaning of Life. In an firework-display of 31-syllable sparkles, probably set off by accident, it lights up any corner of things done, thought, felt, seen, suffered & enjoy...

"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,...

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 d...

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 (th...

"Fresh Air" is an exhilarating, freewheeling ride through landscapes and languages. The poems, all written on the move (tramping the Gobi desert, cycling in Irish drizzle, paddling in Tonga) have the fizz of travellers" tales, the enchantment and the...

"It is the poet's job to invent beautiful falsehoods". John Gallas's falsehoods are beautiful, ribald and audacious. Made from found language liberated from books, walls, the internet and radio, his forty lies construct an extravagant alternative rea...

"The Book with Twelve Tales" is a gallimaufry of stories: comic, frightening, exotic and magical. Here, in John Gallas's richly imagined narrative worlds, are the American gothic of Morten Mortenssen, the pig who eats his owners; the sexual folktale...

John Gallas's new book is two volumes in one. "The Coalville Divan" builds on the poet's fascination with Eastern literature which he tends to experience in Leicester and its environs, where he lives and works. These poems ponder a number of his bes...

"The Song Atlas" is the world's first anthology of poetry from every country in the world. Five years in the making, the creation of such a book as almost as interesting as the poems contained therein. Making "The Song Atlas" by John Gallas Start...

Resistance is Futile opens in Mongolia with a poem called "Yoghurt". It is spring in Ulan Bator and Hoo Gerjan is seeking legal advice over a stolen car. This is the first of twelve weird narratives separated by brief, lyric moments: stories of Samue...