If you liked Be the First to Like This, you may like our other Vagabond Poets title, fault line by Gerry Loose.
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.
Gerry Loose’s fifth 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 co-exists 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 21st 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.
From fault line
about right for these parts
mostly birch
some oak
my living room
where the white hind has
scented me
though I’m glassed in
standard class
on the halted train
through Glen Douglas
she follows my gaze
over her shoulder
to hillside bunkers
trots downwind
in the direction of
the sea’s drifting
foam specks
Faslane
"fault line is a very special piece of work. It feels as if this is a book born of a decade or more's looking and watching (surveillance). I relish the form: field-note, jotting, face-off, counter-movement. There's movement across the sequence, but no neat arc, and somehow over 100 pages there's no sense of repetition in the sense of stagnation, though of course the whole is bound and patterned by its recurrences - the white hart, the wild-flowers, the subs. Words flit and slide, 'fault' is not pure division but a kind of friction and slippage that is productive of vision as well as signalling separation and mutual harm. The atomic dark-stars of the submarines versus but also because of the glowing white deer. It's a poem - poems - of menace and mixture and anger, that finds its way into the immense complexities of contemporary 'nature', recording the beauties born of collision, while also keeping room for 'old aesthetics'. I heard shades of Buile Suibhne, hints of Mercian Hymns, though it is of course its own thing also. And there, too, were glimpses of domestic life lived on amid all this: kindling split, beans shelled, sights seen - the registration of 'enduring beauty' hard up against 'danger of death'.
Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways and Mountains of the Mind
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.
Gerry Loose’s fifth 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 co-exists 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 21st 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.
From fault line
about right for these parts
mostly birch
some oak
my living room
where the white hind has
scented me
though I’m glassed in
standard class
on the halted train
through Glen Douglas
she follows my gaze
over her shoulder
to hillside bunkers
trots downwind
in the direction of
the sea’s drifting
foam specks
Faslane
"fault line is a very special piece of work. It feels as if this is a book born of a decade or more's looking and watching (surveillance). I relish the form: field-note, jotting, face-off, counter-movement. There's movement across the sequence, but no neat arc, and somehow over 100 pages there's no sense of repetition in the sense of stagnation, though of course the whole is bound and patterned by its recurrences - the white hart, the wild-flowers, the subs. Words flit and slide, 'fault' is not pure division but a kind of friction and slippage that is productive of vision as well as signalling separation and mutual harm. The atomic dark-stars of the submarines versus but also because of the glowing white deer. It's a poem - poems - of menace and mixture and anger, that finds its way into the immense complexities of contemporary 'nature', recording the beauties born of collision, while also keeping room for 'old aesthetics'. I heard shades of Buile Suibhne, hints of Mercian Hymns, though it is of course its own thing also. And there, too, were glimpses of domestic life lived on amid all this: kindling split, beans shelled, sights seen - the registration of 'enduring beauty' hard up against 'danger of death'.
Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways and Mountains of the Mind
