Please join us at Kibworth Books to celebrate the publication of John Gallas's new poetry collection, Billy 'Nibs' Buckshot: The Complete Works. John will be reading extracts from the book, signing copies hot off the press and there will be general poetic merriment.

Tickets cost £5 and include a drink. Book yours here.

 
About the book:

'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 author:

John Gallas was born in Wellington in New Zealand and is of Austrian descent, the son of Frederick, né Fritz Eduard Gänzl, an educator, and Nancy Gallas, née Agnes Ada Welsh. He is the younger brother of the historian and writer Kurt Gänzl. He attended the University of Otago in his native New Zealand, and won a Commonwealth Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford to study Medieval English Literature and Old Icelandic and has since lived and worked in York, Liverpool, Leicester and various other locations in England as a bottlewasher, archaeologist and teacher.

Book your tickets here.