This collection of Gerry Loose's poetry selects from thirty years of work. As Peter Manson says in his introduction to the book: "Almost uniquely, Loose unites a Linnaean intoxication with names with a poet's critical sense of the limits of Language and of naming as a process of setting limits, whether on boundary-stones marked in Ogham or in the restrictions placed on human potential by military euphemism. That Loose can combine his sense of the particular with an equally clear-eyed view of the larger dimensions of landscape, history and ethics makes him a valued, wise and above all useful...

A fox hears voices. A dogfox of indeterminate gender careers round desert USA, Hiroshima & Nagasaki in stolen cars & on foot. A barkingdog talks out loud & sings. A demotic fox listens & listens. A coyotefox lies. A coyote speaks truth. A kitfox reads the signs & tunes the car radio. Kitsune eats & drinks. They are all that person himself, who is also summoner of kingfishers, bringer of acorns, old compound eye, the one geese kiss & the drinker of aftershock. that person himself wanders in atom-bomb test sites, mooches in nuclear weapon fallout, from bar to deer park, from festival to razed...

Deliberately and quietly, Gerry Loose has spent years walking the woodlands to observe the poetry of clouds and winds; to cheer the dance of gnats and moths, to listen intently to the musical compositions of wrens and ravens. An Almanac of two different woodlands, one in the Scottish west Highlands and one on Finland's Baltic coast, it celebrates those woodlands and their human lives. With shipping and fishing reports of monks and witches landed, sea eagles and night walking, the voice of the stars and weather forecasts: the beauty and profundity of oakwoods are revealed in a shifting,...