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“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

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9781848618664

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Gerry Loose (1948–2024) was a poet, horticulturist, land-artist and anti-war activist. A “slow-moving nomad”, he lived in England, Ireland, Spain, Morocco, and most recently in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. His work draws on the unbuilt world, the human and the non-human as well as geopolitics. His poems are as likely to be found inscribed on stone in botanic gardens, hospitals, schools and other public places as in his many books. His selected poems, Printed on Water (2007) and two later books, that person himself (2009) and An Oakwoods Almanac (2015) are also published by Shearsman.

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