Ken Cockburn and I wrote this renga – a Japanese form of linked verse – to remember our dear friend, Gerry Loose, who died on Tuesday 30 April, 2024. We planted verses by Gerry in-between our own.
Gerry's work, as a poet and artist, was concerned with healing, justice, and the practice of radical kindness. He touched so many lives, as friend, mentor, encourager, and exemplar of the true good life, embodiment of the dharma gadelica.
Together with his partner Morven, Gerry made real the tradition of the Japanese hut poets, sharing, growing, mending, laughing, living hutopianism, and writing with profound respect for nature. He was also a gardener, devoted to wildness, and an innovator, devoted to tradition.
The paper wish was tied the day after he died, in Starbank Park, Newhaven.
renga: in memoriam Gerry loose
a true relic of dharma gadelica–
the poet’s woolly bunnet
snagged with moss
a preference
for proximity
on the shelf
between Heraclitus /
Tom Leonard
it is only now
it is always now
finding
the frequency of a long
disused path
the deer nibbling
while you’re gone
eked out
almost nothing left
mushroom moon
the hound sniffsnuffles
in the heart of the wood
the unfinished star-
gazing seat
by the unfinished hut
seeing stars
seeing ourselves
patiently
read the map
dewfall
Department of Mountains & Waters:
One Day Dreaming Permit
a rule I will
still hold to :
‘what would Gerry do?’
to act is / to dream
what is said / by the invisible
who better to trace
the breath of horse
in the cypher unknown
daughter gone into the world
sometimes I leave her room light on
after a long winter
Spring of Poetry
Open Atelier
it comes back to me
your sleeping alone again
the first time in years
the sound of rain
on the felt roof
and your noisy neighbours
the laughing yaffles
the whole day
the whole way
brighter
you with Morven and her
with her puckish grin
happens most years –
end-of-tour
stage-set delivery
a paper wish tied
in apple blossom
Notes
Lines in italics from GL, in order of appearance: ‘wren’ (Twelve Airs); lines adapted from ‘Cages’ (the unfinished hut, p. 36); permit issued by the poet in residence (GL), Glasgow’s Botanic gardens, from Ten Seasons; lines from poem LXX, faultlines (2015); lines from ‘Pool’ and ‘Mains of Afforsk’, two of GL’s translations of Ogham inscriptions, published by Jerome Rothenberg on his blog ‘Poems and Poetics’; couplet from 'The Deer Path to My Door' in Printed on Water (2007); adapted from a Facebook post by GL, 15/4/24; haiku by GL, Atoms of Delight; the felt roof of the hut at Carbeth; from 'Spirit' The Unfinished Hut.
Photograph of Gerry Loose taking a pause to read on a walking library walk from Carbeth to Glasgow, for Sweeney's Bothy; photo by Luke Allan. Photograph of Gerry Loose, Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn, The Hidden Gardens, Glasgow, 21 June 2003; photographer unknown.
