Gerry Loose - Böcker

A fox hears voices. A dogfox of indeterminate gender careers round desert USA, Hiroshima & Nagasaki in stolen cars & on foot. A barkingdog talks out loud & sings. A demotic fox listens & listens. A coyotefox lies. A coyote speaks truth. A kitfox reads the signs & tunes the car radio. Kitsune eats & drinks. They are all that person himself, who is also summoner of kingfishers, bringer of acorns, old compound eye, the one geese kiss & the drinker of aftershock. That person himself wanders in atom-bomb test sites, mooches in nuclear weapon fallout, from bar to deer park, from festival to razed landscape.

Deliberately and quietly, Gerry Loose has spent years walking the woodlands to observe the poetry of clouds and winds; to cheer the dance of gnats and moths, to listen intently to the musical compositions of wrens and ravens. An Almanac of two different woodlands, one in the Scottish west Highlands and one on Finland's Baltic coast, it celebrates those woodlands and their human lives. With shipping and fishing reports of monks and witches landed, sea eagles and night walking, the voice of the stars and weather forecasts: the beauty and profundity of oakwoods are revealed in a shifting, precise prose. Rooted in place through habitation and close observation; an exploration of Sunart and Saari through its languages: Gaelic, Finnish, English, birdsong and world news; heaping language onto landscape and excavating what's been before, An Oakwoods Almanac reinvents a classic form.

"without title : it's a modest name for a book, but also a refusal of the very idea of human ownership of land (was there ever a sillier phrase than 'title deed'?). There's an extraordinary clarity of sound in this work, rooted in Loose's recollections of the troubadours in Montpellier and culminating in an airy sequence called 'airs' which sings along with literal birdsong. From Occitania and Japan to the woods and shores of Bute, Loose sees common ground everywhere: noticing familiar plants in strange places, finding friendship across a language-barrier, understanding the soil and the living and mineral beings that make it and are made from it. These poems often look back, but they're filled with a forward-thinking optimism. The (un-)title sequence is written 'for the symbiocene', a time when humans and the natural world will find sustainable and mutually-beneficial ways to co-exist. It's an endlessly strange and baroque celebration of exchange and equivalence and transformation, very funny as well as beautiful ('it is the law / that bees / are fish'), putting us in our place and the fungus in fungibility." -Peter Manson

This collection of Gerry Loose's poetry selects from thirty years of work. As Peter Manson says in his introduction to the book: "Almost uniquely, Loose unites a Linnaean intoxication with names with a poet's critical sense of the limits of Language and of naming as a process of setting limits, whether on boundary-stones marked in Ogham or in the restrictions placed on human potential by military euphemism. That Loose can combine his sense of the particular with an equally clear-eyed view of the larger dimensions of landscape, history and ethics makes him a valued, wise and above all useful friend (I can barely see further than my own nose), and makes these poems - detailed on every scale - a varifocal lens for twenty-first century eyes." Gerry Loose is a poet and playwright based in Glasgow.

'Fault line: 1) a line on a rock surface or the ground that traces a geological fault. 2) a divisive issue or difference of opinion that is likely to have serious consequences.' Poet Gerry Loose's fifth collection maps the 'fault line' dividing man from his environment, centring in this instance on the Faslane submarine base on the eastern shore of Gare Loch in Argyll and Bute, home of the UK's nuclear arsenal. The incongruity of the area's natural beauty coupled with weapons that could reduce it to dust at the push of a button has inspired a book-length poem that probes the delusions of the political and military classes. Loose explores the landscape surrounding Faslane, his hymns to its beauty only throwing into sharper focus its fragility. He describes a land poisoned by the 'deterrent' meant to protect it. In so doing, Loose has reinvented nature poetry for the 21st century, reconnecting with a radical tradition Burns, Byron and Shelley would have recognised and celebrated.

Combining pressing geopolitical urgency with a subtle and gentle lyricism, as we have come to expect from Gerry Loose, his new book ranges wide, broad and deep, to settle back home in the Scotland re-inhabited by Sweeney the king, deranged and fleeing humanity, and a lilting nine day walk from coast to coast across Scotland’s heartland.With narratives from Nuremberg, which contrast city and individual citizens with its long and terrible past, and then stories of an island life – not as insular as might be imagined – in a Finland where anything or nothing may happen, with or without a Luger pistol, this book has a quiet insistence on personal experience.A unique take on the naming of endangered species here could be seen as a metaphor for what the ordinary people in these pages – and their would-be leaders – might in turn become.Expressive, formally inventive, Loose’s seventh full collection night exposures lives right into its title: shining light into murky and overlooked corners which some might wish to be kept in the dark.

This collection of Jidi Majia's poetry in Chinese and Nuosu (a lesser-spoken language in China, though there are around two and a half million speakers) has been translated into the three strands of the Scots language: Lallans by Stuart Paterson, Doric by Sheena Blackhall and Shetlandic by Christine de Luca. These translations will be face-to-face with an English translation by the eminent translator from Chinese, Denis Mair, who will also provide a preface on the context of Jidi Majia's heritage and poetry.Jidi Majia's Scots translators have undoubtedly brought his vitality into alignment with the power of the Scots tongues, as does Denis Mair's excellent and erudite rendering into English. Aimed at two linguistic communities and coming from two linguistic communities at the other side of the planet, this collection presents a perfect symmetry in a globalized world where we need a dialogue not only between the powerful but also and perhaps even more rewardingly between the local and marginalized. The infinite is often to be encountered in the circumscribed.