Creative Conversations: Jim Carruth

Monday, 22 January 2024 1 p.m. – 2 p.m.
Poet Jim Carruth in Conversation
Glasgow University Memorial Chapel University Avenue Glasgow G12 8QQ
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.
About Jim Carruth
Jim Carruth was born in Johnstone in 1963 and grew up on his family’s farm near Kilbarchan. His first collection Bovine Pastoral was published in 2004 and was runner up in the Calum MacDonald Memorial Award. Since then he has brought out a further five collections and an illustrated fable. In 2009 he was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and was the winner of the James McCash poetry competition. In 2010 he was chosen as one of the poets showcased in Oxford Poets 2010.
In 2014 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Glasgow. Killochries was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize
He is one of the founders and current chair of St Mungo’s Mirrorbal,l the Glasgow network of poets and poetry lovers and is a committee member StAnza Scotland’s International Poetry Festival.
“Carruth is an unusual Scottish voice and, consequently a very distinctive one, a direct and clear poetic voice that is able without compromising his huge technical ability, to reach out and engage those who rarely, if ever read poetry”
The Herald
“His poems give voice with subtlety and compassion to the silent decline of dairy farming”
The Scotsman
“Jim Carruth is Scotland’s leading rural poet, an activist and farmer whose poems are moving testaments to a fragile way of life.”
Glastonbury Festival
Creative Conversations is funded by The Ferguson Bequest. Online attendance is also available. A zoom link will be sent to ticket holders on the day.
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