Description
Publication date: 01 March 2026
In remote Assynt, where the past is recreated from rock and bone, a crofter and her estranged daughter search for some common ground in their annual week together.
Jim Carruth’s new novel-in-verse, Knockan, intimately explores how heavily our lived experience can weigh upon us.
Powerful, spare and heart-breaking, Jim Carruth’s new narrative poem centres on geology and fossils as he explores the deep emotional life of two women confronting their past amidst the savage beauty of Assynt. Layered and astute, it shows the crofter’s elemental struggle to survive alongside their livestock and how the scars of the past will keep breaking open until its effect on the present is acknowledged. Flora and fauna shine out of the snowy expanse of the page as Carruth mines that white space to express the silences around his acute observations. – Martina Evans
The words worked like the scant intimate points we connect with in an otherwise overwhelming landscape. It left me with a quiet, moving confirmation that love – like the land – is shaped and misshaped not by ideals but by pressure and accumulation. – Cynan Jones
Jim Carruth’s poems sing off the page in a ballad taken up by two voices, crackling with a tension that is echoed in the land, ‘ice-gripped./ Gripped but not static’. As the earth shows its scars and as conversations turn jagged, the music changes with them. Each crystal note in ‘Knockan’ is precise and local but reverberates across geographies and into the far reaches of the human heart. – Imtiaz Dharker
Jim Carruth was born in Johnstone in 1963 and grew up on his parents’ dairy farm. He is an award winning poet and current Makar of Glasgow. His publications include The Auchensale Trilogy and Killochries, a verse novella that was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection, the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year award, and the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize.
Supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
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