Black Cart

Bale Fire

Jim Carruth

Both Polygon £8.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

Do not be fooled into thinking the countryside is an idyll. If that were so, we would all be farmers, admiring morning sun on frost, drinking in birdsong, smiling at the sight of fox’s paw print, mole’s hill or crow’s nest.

As Jim Carruth’s clear-eyed poems of the agricultural life make abundantly clear, there is joy, of a sort, to be found in working with the land and its beasts, but there is also pain and grief, stretching far back in time, but also pointing to the future. There is community, but there is also isolation so severe, a Scottish sheep or dairy farm might as well be the north pole. There is hope, but those who dare nurture it know they are taunting the arbiters of rain and snow, disease, blight and failed crops.

These companion volumes are not, however, a lyrical twin to Cold Comfort Farm. There are no cliches here, no melodrama, just reality, sometimes brutal as stone, at times transcendently uplifting. These portraits of country life are cocooned in a wider landscape within which the poet sets his scene. What else would you expect of a man “who was born/ while my father finished milking his cows.”

The first of what Carruth intends to build into a rural trilogy was Black Cart, published a couple of years ago by Freight Books. Thanks to Freight’s demise, that profoundly moving book was almost lost to sight, so it is a pleasure to see it alongside his latest work, Bale Fire (a nod perhaps to Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire?). As this collection opens, you sense a conversation continuing. It started with the horse-drawn black cart that used to carry Carruth’s father and other field workers home at the end of the harvest day, as recalled in the title poem. The youthful recollections of the poet’s dad when he was part of a gang of harvesters, set the poem alight: “Johnny/must’ve slipped off /unnoticed, and the others too when their time came/ like orchard’s ripe fruit, dropped soft to the ground,/disappeared fast down dirt tracks and narrow lanes.”

As with this description, its last lines speak to the years to come: “until there was just me huddled by the driver’s back/ the darkest mile left to go and too late for the dance.”

There is no avoiding the elegaic tone of both these books. How could it be otherwise, as farms are sold, and countless farmers die by their own hands, and children in towns are so unfamiliar with the countryside, some on seeing sheep for the first time call them “cloud dogs”.

Black Cart sets the tone, opening with the poet returning to his family’s dairy farm near Bridge of Weir, an inheritance he chose not to accept, although his younger brother took it on. “Turning the final corner/I picture my welcome: / the bark the collie gives a stranger; / the slow burn of recognition in a wrinkled face; and my words/ faltering and uncertain,/ like the first unsteady steps of an Ayrshire calf/ staggering towards her mother/ with a hunger new born.”

That volume caught Carruth’s family on the wing, as does Bale Fire, yet this collection is flintier, more narrowly focussed on the land and those who worked it. There is the Ratman, the Molecatcher, the woman with a piggery, or the solitary old soul who tries to entice children in for company, having lost her own to the river.

The title poem dresses the stage for what is to follow, namely Carruth attempting to resurrect the old farm life he remembers from childhood. This was an occupation his father followed all his working years, and that four hundred years of his family had pursued in one small corner of Renfrewshire. The act of resuscitation and commemoration, he suggests, is in part a question of language, hunting down forgotten words, breathing life back into them:

“is there a single linguist left to irrigate our hill/

from this almost empty well or an alchemist/

who could gather in the final breaths of place,/

guttural vowels, the grunted clods of consonants/

and create from these brief fragments of sound/

an echo louder than its diminished source?”

If that is indeed the challenge he has set himself with Bale Fire, he succeeds. This is an explosive book, for all its seeming quietness. It pulsates with energy, past and present. Emotion burns on the page, all the more powerful for being strictly contained within Carruth’s deceptively informal style. Some of what he writes about is as old as the first ploughs, as in Sower: “From the pouch around his waist/ he broadcasts a field of seeds/ on a breeze of his own making.”

It could be a scene from Breughel, whose The Fall of Icarus features in Black Cart. But modern life frequently intrudes, as in Transferable Skills. This is blackly humorous, capturing the inhumane double-speak of the office, where the narrator has been told he is being let go from his position, “as though I was being released/back into the wild”. As his managers drone on, he reflects: “I, who can pick up the scent of a dead tup/ in a ditch, half a mile downwind/ and recognise it for what it is and was. I, who can smell the stench of something now.”

There is not a poor poem here, but some are outstanding. In writing of the British countryside, it is inevitable there are fleeting echoes of Seamus Heaney, or Ted Hughes, as in Peat, or The Night of the Fox: “peck of bantam beak, splay-toed claws and spur/ no match for the violence”

But Carruth’s voice is all his own, a singularly fresh, painterly talent, who never squanders a word. Bale Fire can be read alone, but there is double the punch when it is paired with Black Cart. Between them they are already creating an indelible, honest record of the farming world, that of smallholders, hillsheep farmers, dairy folk, harvesters: hard-toiling men, women and youngsters who know their animals by name, can count them into the fold at night, or see them sleeping under the stars. Or, like a man called McLean who, stumbling home across the stubble after a convivial night out, leaves behind a field of neatly stacked bales, gathered under cover of darkness and the influence of Laphroaig.

Beasts and birds fill the pages, from sheep and moles, cattle and dogs, to the crows that set farmers reaching for their guns and traps. For these birds in particular Carruth has a deep loathing, returning often to their carrion ways, as they sit watching a tumbled sheep, beaks whetted for the feast.

None of the poems is long, but among the finest are two of the shortest. Setting Out is a vivid and feeling an account of milking: “Pulling together, we sense the swell/ edge out of the harbour/on a high tide of milk.” Quite different in mood is After the Corncrakes, in which the poet’s father and friends mourn the disappearance of corncrakes. This leads onto an anthem of loss: “As we in turn remember our fathers’ voices/ calling to us as children across the same cut fields/ but no longer and nowhere to be found.”

Carruth’s search for the land and life that is fast disappearing has an urgency that is bracing. Fear of forgetting or carelessly letting go stalks both collections: “a bale string snapped now will leave you/ holding one end, unable to ever get back.” Glasgow is lucky to have Carruth as poet laureate, a man with one foot on tilled earth, the other on tarmac, and a heart that beats in time with the dairy herd.