Please join us to celebrate the launch of Billy ‘Nibs’ Buckshot: The Complete Works by John Gallas. The reading will be hosted by Rory Waterman. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2 redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EDOoKZIiTcK4csYKdNUV6w#/registration and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing https://www.facebook.com/events/8715453738467473

‘Everything is like life’ – Mr Omer, David Copperfield

This epigraph hovers over The Complete Works as it does over all the astonishing experimental work of the New Zealand poet John Gallas. And by ‘everything’, he means everything. This collection has no Great Purpose, apart from exploring and expanding upon the contradictory Meanings of Life. In a pyrotechnic display of thirty-one-syllable sparkles, set off by accident and protracted by design, it lights up any corner of things done, thought, felt, seen, suffered and enjoyed. It is contagious: readers begin tankaing as soon as they close the book. A walk in the country will never be the same.

Here the writer, barely in control, stands back at a safe distance and watches, mostly with a smile. Here, the reader is the quarry. Contradictions abound, ideas morph, preferences and amusements change – no thoughtful guide is available, but none is needed: crazy and merry variety make this collection amenable to all, especially when all have not quite made up their minds about what on earth is going on. Warning: there are love poems lurking here.

About the speakers:

John Gallas is a poet from Aotearoa/NZ, born in Wellington in 1950 and presently living near Markfield, Leicestershire, in the UK. HE has published 31 books of poetry, mainly with Carcanet Press. Others include SLG Press Oxford, Dempsey & Windle, Indigo Dreams, Cerasus Publishing, Cold Hub NZ, Five Leaves Editions (Nottingham), New Walk Editions (Leicester), Gerolstein Press (NZ) and Agraphia. His books include 8 poetry translations and a libretto for David Knotts (Toads on a Tapestry) and Alasdair Nicolson (The Iris Murders). He has been Orkney St Magnus Festival Poet; Fellow of the English Association; Saxonship Resident Poet (www.saxonship.org); John Clare The Visit poet; multiple prize and award winner (Wells Festival, Reuben Rose International, Welsh Poetry, Manchester Portico Library Prize, Stiwdio Maelor, Bucks Mills, Slipstream, Parkinsons Art, Corsham Story-Telling etc); and is presently co-editor of Te Prere with Vaughan Rapatahana. Gallas has appeared on BBC Radios 3 and 4 and given readings at the Commonwealth Games (Manchester), QE Hall, Cheltenham, Goldsmiths, Kirkwall, Stromness, Imperial College, Oxford and more. He contributes sets of world poetry translations to PN Review and is presently working on Fork Flats (a secret) and Alfred Lichtenstein. He disappears for a chunk of each week to a caravan/bike in Lincolnshire; careens up and down with Leicester City; and is a Don Quixote , Tristram Shandy , Tom Jones , Pamuk, Hardy, Donne, Icelandic Saga, Schnittke, Fellini, Thorvaldsdottir, Randy Newman, Munch, Nolan, Turkey, Pacific islands kind of bloke. Billy Nibs Buckshot: The Complete Works (2024) is his fourteenth Carcanet edition.

Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, grew up mainly in Lincolnshire, and lives in Nottingham. His previous full-length collections, all published by Carcanet, are: Tonight the Summers Over (2013), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for a Seamus Heaney Award; Sarajevo Roses (2017), which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize for Second Collections; and Sweet Nothings (2020). He is also a press critic, and has published several books on modern and contemporary poetry. He is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Nottingham Trent University.