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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.
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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).
A beautiful poem from a beautiful book.
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