Elementary Particles by Gerry Loose

This is a wonderful book. The poetry is really rooted in the natural world, concerned with life and death, our place in nature and the nature of communication. Soms of the poems are tiny haiku like pieces, others are long works divided down into parts that fit together, like the wonderful Crow Work, a series of interlocking pieces about crows - their biology and ecology and their place in mythology. Anyone who loves nature will be fascinated by part 2 of Figure in a Landscape, which is made up of listings from the poet's nature diary:

A solitary rabbit. A wren in the dry stone dyke. An abundance of primroses in the ditches. Lambs bounding on every side. Ploughs.

This same careful observation is evident in all the poems, this is from the facts of the matter:

Making a song for myself
in cutting wood on a clear day

goldcrest working the haws
brown wren in her quickset cave

Some poems here are not so straight forward and require a bit more thought to read, but there is never any sense of obscurity for the sake of it, and I found almost all the poems to be worth an immediate second re-reading, for the pure enjoyment of it.

Elementary Particles by Gerry Loose, published 1993 by Taranis Books