Gerry Loose
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2010
June 30th: from Carbeth: the unfinished hut :-

                         

It’s been a long time since I saw my friend Takaya, since he lives in Kyoto, but last week he visited and we drank and ate and talked and walked as we do at all our meetings. Right now Takaya is making a garden path. He is slowly putting this together from stones he collects on his 5 mile daily walk on Omuro – the little hill behind his house which has 88 shrines. Each shrine is a little hut in itself, dedicated to buddhas (inside each is a seated buddha, or sometimes the founder of Ninnaji), and the whole walk along these shrines is in the grounds of Ninnaji temple. The course of the walk echoes the 88 temples’ pilgrimage of Shikoku Island south of Hiroshima.

(replaces June 8th entry; continue reading at the unfinished hut site: link below)

May 20th

I've made an entrance into a new sort of almanac/journal: Carbeth: the unfinished hut. This will probably change in appearance over the next few weeks; but I've made a start. Changes won't be fast (nor maybe will entries) but will come. If you read the entrance, you'll understand why. 

Carbeth huts have been there for  getting on a hundred years. After fourteen years of dispute & rent strike with the landowner, Carbeth Hutters Community Company has the chance to buy & manage the hutting areas. A phased community buy out. You can read more on the remarkable Bella Caledonia site here (scroll down to the entry for April 20th 2010)  & here. The response you'll find in the unfinished hut, however, will be wider than the purely political aspects of landownership - it'll take in what it means to inhabit a hut. And what it has meant to others in other places. A place of both community & solitary reflection.

April 30th

The poem-plant labels made for StAnza 2010 have been retained in St Andrews for an indefinite period. 
They may be seen still in the front & back gardens of the Preservation Trust Museum & one at the Town Hall. The labels for plants which St Andrews Botanic Gardens supplied have been removed: the plants needed the expert care of the Botanic Gardens & were returned there.

March 23rd

Some poem-plant labels are currently to be seen at St Andrews as part of StAnza 2010, the annual poetry festival. They are standard botanic plant labels with a sort of errant guerrilla text as well as the botanic & common names of the plant they refer to. In a couple of instances the plant is not there, since it's the wrong time of year, in which case there is an extra label by way of explanation. Of sorts. They can be seen until 29th March at the Preservation Trust Museum, the Byre Theatre & at the Town Hall.  The plants in question are a mixture of native & exotic: hart's tongue, phlox, mignonette, Japanese banana, another ornamental banana, lavender, rue, fennel, two apple trees, a rose, and mind-your-own-business. There's also a plastic wisteria. They'll be seen later this year at Glasgow Botanic Gardens.

February 2nd 

Not long confirmed, Peter Manson & I will read together in Poland at Bydgoszcz University on 17th March & at Poznan University on the 19th.        

January 2nd 

BBC Radio Scotland programme Out Of Doors has some words from me in Glen Fruin & a few of my poems from fault line concerning the area. The programme also features Ian Stephen in Lewis, Alec Finlay at Little Sparta & Helen Boden in the Pentland Hills. Listen for four more days here. 

fault line (100 short poems concerning the landscape round Faslane, Scotland's nuclear submarine facility) will be published in its entirety in 
issue 10 of The International Literary Quarterly, the online journal, (www.interlitq.org) on February 1st.

2009

December 16th

Newly published:

Bob & Susan Arnold’s remarkable & unrivalled Longhouse press in Vermont has published a beautiful fold-out booklet of mine – Starworks. To find it, go here & link to What's New at Longhouse Fall 2009. Scroll down slowly - there's news of many fine publications from the imprint. You'll come to Starworks soon enough. 

In a roundup with other publications, titled Some Beauty, Bob Arnold mentions my Oystercatcher Press pamphlet the deer path to my door (see below at the March 18th entry). 
Go here: http://longhousepoetryandpublishers.blogspot.com/ 
& scroll down to December 11^th, but again, don’t scroll down too quickly, it’s all rewarding reading.

Visit http://www.longhousepoetry.com/  to find a world of poetry publication I thought had disappeared – publications by & for folk who make & shape poetry of all kinds.

11th

A Wilder Vein (see below) has been named by The Independent as one of the best nature & environment books for Christmas 2010 : read here
There are other reviews & mentions in the Irish Times, The Scottish Review of Books & The Great Outdoors (but no links to those) as well as a feature in November on Radio 4's Excess Baggage programme & in the Scotsman, here as well as a pre-publication article & extract of fellow contributor Rajah Shehadeh's work in the Guardian here. 

November 29th

that person himself was one of Tom Leonard's choices for his Books of the Year in the Sunday Herald

September
Just arrived -  my copies of Two Ravens Press anthology A Wilder Vein, edited by Linda Cracknell, with a foreword by Robert Macfarlane.
It contains extracts from my Ardnamurchan Almanac.

       (ISBN 978-1-906120-43-6; £10.99 Publication date November 2 2009)

Peter Manson & I will be reading at the Irish Writers' Centre, 
Dublin to celebrate International Translation Day on September 30th.   
Peter  will read from his  Mallarme work & I'll read  some versions 
from the Japanese.

June
my new book that person himself is now available here
read what's written on the back cover:

"That Person Himself" is a tender, angry and grimly humorous work that confronts the more vicious absurdities of human thought: the chilling blend of doggedly opaque legalese and naked statements of intent that govern troops, nuclear weapons programmes, the strategic use of mass casualties, the "War on Terror". Gerry Loose leads us to face the unthinkable by creating a fragmented narrative of interwoven myths, strange articles of faith, bodily frailty, human anguish, beauty and horror. There is a sense here of minds in flight from injuries beyond description, ghosts of mortality and the threat of impossible suffering in vulnerable lives, vulnerable landscapes, vulnerable flesh. This is an important, powerful book - part prophecy, part lament - an hallucinogenic demonstration of how lost we can become when we conjure the power of our own nightmares.                                                   AL Kennedy

Is that Olson with a Scots burr, a Glaswegian Gunslinger on the road to ruin?  The new world with a new ear, that person himself speeds down the highways to a soundtrack scanned off the AM dial and backed with a missa solemnis sampled from the great books.  Anubis meets Coyotefox in a wild bestiary, spinning the fable of the atomic age, a myth-weave for past and future destruction, forgotten in political euphoria and economic panic.  Now read on.....                                                                 David Lloyd

Gerry Loose’s poem is proof beyond doubt that the Old Ways are resilient, & still full of power and beauty. Building on his earlier work with haiku, Scottish lyrics, and botanical stdies, this book shapes up as something of an epic of the nuclear era. Its grounds are are the roads and landscapes of the American West – a pilgrimage beset by ghosts, military personnel, blues singers, and weird documents – before moving on to Hiroshima & the modern heart of darkness. There is the little miracle of plant life returning to devastated Japanese precincts – despite assertions that nothing would grow for a century – and I read Gerry’s lists of botanicals as one long prayer of great hope.
                                                                         Andrew Schelling

                               May 11th
                       
                        is Peter Manson's 40th birthday (although by
                        some reckoning he is 80 - ask him)
                        Happy birthday, Peter!


                        April 
                      

                        
                       March 18th

Purbeck stone with my poem in the shape of infinity to be read many ways will soon be put in place at Springburn Park as part of Alec Finlay's 
Stobhill Gate project

**

there will (probably) be no new entries to

An Ardnamurchan Journal

which ran from September 2007 until September 2008

**

 2008

September 19th commission to make a Poetry Flag for National Poetry Day (October 9th) to be flown in the Botanic Gardens, Glasgow. 

September 18th reading at Glasgow School of Art (St Mungo's Mirrorball) with Peter Manson.

September 9th launch of poetry on stairwell, in lifts & on 3 panels at Princess Alexandra Eye Pavilion, Edinburgh; a commission for Art in Hospitals.

August 18th reading at the Edinburgh Book Festival with Norrie Bissell.

August 16th reading at the inaugural West Port Book Festival. 

August 8th & 9th

reading at the Tartan Heart Festival with Tom Leonard & Mandy Haggith

August 4th

The From Kyoto to Carbeth show has reached its last venue, the Scottish Poetry Library. Kenichi Suganuma, the Consul General for Japan opened the show on 31st July. Thanks are due to all there, especially Lizzie MacGregor, who kindly supplied all the plants for the ikebana.

July 16th

My flag to celebrate the 90th birthday of Nelson Mandela will be first flown from the Glasgow Botanic Gardens flagpole on Friday 18th July at 11am. It was a commssion from Culture & Sport, Glasgow & made by James Stevenson (Flags) Ltd., Glasgow. I'll try to get some images for this site of when it's raised. There will also be music by Allan Tall. 

(flag image below & another on the Home page)

July 10th reading at the 'Activism, Apocalypse & the Avant Garde' conference at Edinburgh University.

June 16th 
read bliss is bliss at Gists & Piths

                        January 25th 

From Kyoto to Carbeth: poems & plants of the hills

(Scotsman review of this show at: REVIEW)

For  four years I've been collaborating with  Takaya Fujii  in Kyoto. Each day Takaya walks the 88 shrines of the pilgrim path on Omuro, the little hill behind his house in the foothills north west of the city. I've walked this path with him many times. Here he watches the unfolding of the seasons & each month selects a plant  relevant to both the season & to the culture of Japan. He makes an arrangement of this, 

sends me the name of the plant & I make a poem concerning this plant, if I know it, or a Scottish equivalent. The poem is translated, given to a calligrapher, Seigan  Urai, who makes his versions

& to a ceramic artist, Mikako Kawai

who designs & makes a vase for that specific plant. All these artists have an extraordinary grasp of plants.

Poems, translations, calligraphy & ceramics will be shown at the Galerie Weissraum, Kyoto from January 10th until 31st 2008, (where it is called from plant to plant). 

After that, Kyoto to Carbeth will be at the 
Collins Gallery, Glasgow 23rd February - 5th April 2008  
Hill House, Helensburgh 14th April - 18th May 2008
Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries 24th May - 26th June 2008
Scottish Poetry Library during the Edinburgh Festival
1st August - 12th September 2008. 

There will be a book of all poems & translations, with images of the calligraphy & ceramics by Morven Gregor.

A sequence from Printed on Water has been chosen for inclusion in the Scottish Poetry Library's 20 Best Poems for 2007, edited by Alan Spence. You can read it here:  from the deer path to my door.