Gerry Loose’s sixth collection maps the fault line dividing man from his environment. His territory is the Gare Loch in Argyll and Bute, its outstanding beauty at odds with the Faslane submarine base on its eastern shore, home of the UK’s nuclear arsenal. The beauty of the area coexists uneasily with the knowledge that it also harbours weapons that can reduce their target to radioactive ash. This tension has inspired a book-length poem that probes the delusions of the political and military classes.
Loose explores the countryside 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 twenty-first century. Not content merely to evoke the landscape’s charms, Loose reconnects with the political roots of romanticism. Blending psychogeography with Tom Leonard’s radicalism, Fault Line reinvigorates the tradition, finding in it, as Burns and Wordsworth did, a radical critique of the present.
 | Gerry LooseGerry Loose is a poet whose work is found inscribed in galleries, hospitals, Botanic Gardens and wild places, as well as in his many books. He is the recipient of a Creative Scotland Award, a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, a Kone Foundation Award and a Hermann Kesten Stipendium, among others |
