Far Field

Description

Far Field is the third and final book in The Auchensale Trilogy, a series of poetry cycles capturing the changing rural landscape of the West of Scotland. Following on from its predecessors Black Cart and Bale Fire, the book consists of three cycles bound together by footers. A number of poems in the early part of the book are in response to paintings by the Glasgow Boys particularly those painted during their time spent in agricultural communities. Many of the poems are highly personal with a number about family members. These include a series of elegies for his late father. It also focuses on the present day looking to the challenges ahead for the family farm and that passing baton to the next generation.

Jim Carruth has published two collections and nine chapbooks, starting with Bovine Pastoral (2004). In 2009 he was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. He won the 2013 McLellan Poetry Prize and, in 2014, the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award. Killochries, originally published in 2015, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Scottish Poetry Book of the Year, the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize and the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize for first collection. His follow up, Black Cart, came out in 2017. Jim is the current poet laureate of Glasgow.

'I am in awe of his verbal power and the author's fidelity to love, loss, and community. This is a book of land and landscapes, and the gift of being alive to them' -- David Morley 'I cannot think of any other collection which so intimately and sensitively documents a beloved corner of a beloved country and the folk who farmed there, through all their seasons and weathers' -- John Glenday 'In deeply moving poems, as fierce as they are tender, Carruth honours a way of life that is threatened or already lost... Every line is as honed as the landscape, evoking the harrowing, relentless aspects of farming as well as the meaning and beauty to be found in everyday routines' -- Jane Clarke