Forty Lies

Description

'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 reality of Russian assassins and magical shirts, Babylonian gardens, flying monks and the mathematics of Omar Khayyam. From Inner Mongolia to outer space, in tanka and sonnet and villanelle, Viking haiku and musical staves, Gallas collaborates with the print-maker Sarah Kirby to beguile the reader with stories and puzzles, and with pictures that create visual false memories of facts that never were.

John Gallas was born in 1950 in Wellington, New Zealand. He came to England in 1971 and currently works for the Leicestershire Student Support Service. He has published six earlier collections of poetry with Carcanet and edited the anthology of world poetry The Song Atlas (2002).