Black Cart

Passing those unmarked crossings and road ends, the horse slowed on its journey but never stopped so Johnny, his song long silent, must’ve slipped off unnoticed, and the others too when their time came, like orchards’ ripe fruit, dropped soft to the ground, disappeared fast down dirt tracks and narrow lanes. Jim Carruth is Glasgow’s Makar, or poet laureate. His debut collection, a poetry novel, Killochries, received widespread acclaim and was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh Poetry Award for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Award. Black Cart is Carruth’s second full collection, and continues to draw on his upbringing in the farmlands of Renfrewshire. It’s a meditation on lives richly lived and the approach of winter.