Jim Carruth, Black Cart

He put a small pole over his shoulder with a hankie containing his belongings on the end, and set off. His mother watched him cross to the far end of the second field. Then he turned back for home, where his mother opened up the hankie to see what he’d put inside it. All he’d taken was a piece of paper and a pencil.

For the next two decades, when his mother told that story, it was just one of those daft things children do. Only in his thirties, when Carruth started to write poetry, or in his forties, when he started self-publishing poetry pamphlets, did it did it start to sound vaguely prophetic. His mother lived to see the first of these – Bovine Pastoral (2004) singled out for praise in The Herald by Michael Russell, the SNP politician.

Already, Carruth had found his theme; he would be the poet of rural Scotland, of the stoicism of its people, their love of the land and their fear of losing it. These themes play out in the background of Killochries, his much-praised 2015 verse novella about a young addict from the city who is helped to recovery by working alongside an elderly hill-farming relative. And they’re fundamental to Black Cart, the powerfully elegiac collection he’ll be launching on March 11, when he joins fellow Makars Jackie Kay and Liz Lochhead at an event that promises to be one of the highlights of this year’s Aye Write!.

If you think in stereotypes, you wouldn’t put Jim Carruth down as a poet. He’s not wild and woolly but neatly dressed and tidily coiffed and instead of arriving eccentrically late turns up for our interview at eight on the dot. That’s eight as in 8am, an hour when poets are traditionally mid-sleep or hungover or both. “Actually,” he smiles, “I’m always at my best in the mornings.” Another myth bites the dust.

For the next hour and a half, he talks lucidly about land surveying in Turkey, and in Glasgow organising a link-up between poets and Big Issue sellers, setting up the Clydebuilt mentoring scheme for poets, and co-founding the St Mungo’s Mirrorball poetry readings. All of which require both organisational skill and an ability to impose order on chaos – although none quite as much as the first time I met him, at the StAnza poetry festival in St Andrews, when he organised a five-hour event at which 100 poets took turns to read.

So: an ordered mind. But one that has room for passion too. And to understand that, look again at the farms surrounding his parents’ land: Meikle Burntshields, Little Burntshields, Shillingworth, Mid Barnaigh, East Barnaigh, Laigh Auchencloich, High Auchencloich, Laigh Auchensale, The Braes, Law, Lawnmarnock, Barnbrock, Moniabrock, Monkland, Dampton, Barnbeth, Botherickfield, Clevans, Lochend. When the eight-year-old Jim Carruth tried and failed to escape to Glasgow, they were still working dairy farms. Now all 19 – every one of them within a three-mile radius of Jim’s family farm – are lost to cows, their herds long ago taken to the abattoir, the milking parlours empty, their equipment dumped or auctioned off. The massacre of Scottish dairying continues: his brother-in-law four miles away was the latest casualty.

There’s only one local farm that still keeps faith with the crazed economics of dairying. It’s the one he grew up in. His youngest brother David runs it now. “Every day,” says Jim, “he’ll get up at five, work hard all day. He’s gone to college, we’ve got all the most modern techniques, yet every night when he goes to bed, he is poorer because the cost of milk is so low. It’s even cheaper than bottled water.

“I assume when the Highland Clearances were happening, people wrote about it, talked about it, sang about it. But there’s no noise about the collapse of dairy farming. It’s happened silently.” What happened to those 19 neighbouring farms? “Some will be beef and sheep, some will be second homes, some stables. And some will just be run down.”

But it’s what else that has been lost that forms the subject of Black Cart. Before these barely noticed “economic clearances”, those who lived on the land had a deep, long, connection to it: in the case of Carruth’s family, this is chartered all over the map of west Renfrewshire: Carruthmuir, Carruthhouse, Carruth Road, Carruthburn: “Our family has only moved about three miles in 400 years,” he says. “We were tenant farmers and took our surname from the land we farmed.” The land, in other words, isn’t just in his family’s hearts; it’s part of who they are.

“The very first thing I remember – only two seconds, but it’s really vivid – is of watching my parents milk in an old byre. I didn’t have a pushchair, so they jammed me in a ten-gallon can. I wrote this memory into a poem before they both died, but even then I suppose I was trying to bring them back. And maybe I’m still trying to do that, to say that the rural way of life is still valid. That we need to hear its voices, to think about what we are doing to the countryside.”

Scotland’s literary culture is so city-centred that Carruth’s poetry ploughs a singularly lonely furrow. While nature poetry flourishes, poetry about the people who actually work the land is as endangered as Scottish dairy farms themselves.

The irony is that Carruth left farming long before he ever started writing poems about it. He’d seen how hard his father had to work, and knew that he hadn’t got the heart for much of it. Instead he read geology at Glasgow University, took a postgraduate degree in land surveying and went off to Turkey in search of oil. Returning to Scotland, he began working in community regeneration projects. He currently works for the Glasgow Health Board where he has the Orwellian-sounding job title of “head of people and improvement”.

But the love of the land remained, a love of poetry developed further, and in his thirties he joined a writers’ group that met in the library in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, and started writing his own poems. His first prizewinning poem, Homecoming – also the first in Black Cart – was written 18 years ago. It’s about driving back from the city, imagining his welcome at the family farm: “the bark the collie gives the stranger/the slow burn of recognition/ in a wrinkled face”.

The rest of the collection expands on that journey back to the farm in different ways, perhaps none better than the title poem itself. Black Cart follows his father’s memories of a gang of harvesters singing lustily as a Clydesdale-pulled cart carries them home, the sun still hot on their backs and the promise of a ceilidh that evening warming their hearts. But this is a journey through time too, and one by one the workers drop off the cart as the night grows colder “until there was just me left huddled by the driver’s back/the darkest mile left to go and too late for the dance.”

It’s all there. The 19 neighbouring farms lost to dairying are those farm workers who have quietly slipped off the back of the cart as the Clydesdale pulled on uphill. The hill itself, “the darkest mile left to go”; that’s the ceilidhs no longer held, the slow death of local knowledge, the ending of cattle bloodlines, the breaking of intergenerational links – all vanishing in the drop of the auctioneer’s gavel. But all you need to record this – as Carruth has done in this remarkably powerful and moving collection – is what, long ago, he left home with: a pencil and a piece of paper.

Jim Carruth will be at the Glasgow book festival Aye Write! on Saturday 11 March at 6:30pm. The Herald and Sunday Herald are the event's media partners.

Black Cart is published by Freight Books, price £9.99