The poems of James (Jim) Caruth have featured on the blog before. Here is the link. Last year his new collection, Speechless at Inch, was published by smith/doorstop. It was shortlisted for The Derek Walcott Poetry Prize 2023.

The striking cover image is of Janet Mullarney’s The Straight and Narrow. Made in 1991 of painted wood, it measures 228 x 320 x 137 cm. It’s in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Here is a seasonal poem from Speechless at Inch:

Above Redmires

It was mid-December, a back road
through the low hills that nurse
the city’s northern edge, when I came upon

a flock of black-faced ewes
crowded in a corner of a field,
a squeeze of tattered wool and clouded breath.

I stopped the car to look around,
searching for a dog slipped the leash
or a fox tasting the air along the hedgerows

but as far as I could see
there was no other living thing
between those frightened sheep and me.

Biography

James Caruth was born in Belfast but has lived in Sheffield for over thirty years. He has had several pamphlets and a collection published: A Stone’s Throw (Staple Press, 2007), Marking the Lambs (Smith/Doorstop, 2012), The Death of Narrative (Smith/Doorstop, 2014) and Narrow Water (Poetry Salzburg, 2017).