Combining pressing geopolitical urgency with a subtle and gentle lyricism, as we have come to expect from Gerry Loose, his new book ranges wide, broad and deep, to settle back at home in the Scotland reinhabited by Sweeney the king, deranged and fleeing humanity, and a lilting nine-day walk from coast to coast across Scotland’s heartland.

With narratives from Nuremberg, setting city and individual citizens against a long and terrible past, and with stories of an island life – not as insular as might be imagined – in a Finland where anything or nothing may happen, with or without a Luger pistol, this book has a quiet insistence on personal experience. A unique take on the naming of endangered species here could be seen as a metaphor for what the ordinary people in these pages – and their would-be leaders – might in turn become.

Expressive and formally inventive, Loose’s seventh full collection night exposures lives right into its title: shining light into murky and overlooked corners which some might wish to be kept in the dark.

In 2022, Loose was recipient of the Society of Authors’ Cholmondeley Award, a prize that recognises the achievement and distinction of a poet and their body of work.

Reviews

"In the poetry of Gerry Loose, medicine and sickness heal each other. His Dharma eye sees the unity of the relative and the absolute, the local and the cosmic, the personal and the political. He is an artist beyond category, and this may be his best book so far." – Dogo Barry Graham, author of Kill Your Self: Life after Ego and The Book of Man