ISBN: 9781846975004

 

Bale Fire is a book in three cycles. The first explores the darker side of communities in decline. The middle is a transposition of elements and characters of the Odyssey to a Scottish hill farm and its neighbours. The final part looks at the idea of harvest and loss.

 

Jim Carruth offers here both a celebration and an elegy. The poems in this collection address the themes of our time: war, friendship, honesty, violence, humanity and love.

 

‘A crop of the most rooted, the most unflinching intimate poems’ — Liz Lochhead

‘These poems will last as long as the land and people they grew from’ — John Glenday

‘This is a book of lucid and visionary power’ — Bernard O’Donoghue

‘An urgent and elegiac evocation of land and people’ — Rosemary Goring

 

Jim Carruth is a poet, editor and awards and events programmer. He is the co-founder and chair of St Mungo’s Mirrorball and has been an artistic advisor for StAnza. He is the current Poet Laureate of Glasgow. His poetry has won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship; the James McCash poetry competition, the McLellan Poetry Prize and the Callum Macdonald prize.

​He has brought out four full collections and nine chapbooks. Killochries was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year, the Seamus Heaney Centre For Poetry Prize and the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize. Far Field came out in 2023 and was the final part of the acclaimed trilogy following on from Black Cart and Bale Fire.

 

https://www.jimcarruth.co.uk/

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