without title - Gerry Loose

"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