Knockan, by Jim Carruth review: 'polyphonic and complex'
Set on a croft in Assynt, the new verse novella from Jim Carruth is a multi-layered exploration of a troubled mother-daughter relationship, writes Roger Cox
Jim Carruth has been Glasgow’s Makar since 2014, yet despite his role as the official bard of Scotland’s largest urban centre, he remains one of our most eloquent and intriguing explorers of the intense psychological dramas of rural life.
In his verse novella Killochries, published in 2015, he charted a slowly developing relationship between two very different men: a gruff shepherd with an elderly mother ill in bed and no sons or daughters to take over the family farm when he gets too old; and a younger man, a poet and a relative, sent to the farm from the city by his mother after suffering some kind of breakdown, in the hope that time spent in the country will help him to heal.
One of the most notable features of Killochries is the way it shows how, particularly in conversation, a few words can sometimes speak volumes. At one point towards the end of the book, for example, as his relationship with the shepherd finally begins to thaw, the younger man talks "of girlfriends / the beginnings, the many ends". When he's finished, the shepherd simply says "There wis somebody aince" prompting the younger man to comment "and that was all / and that was everything."
Carruth's subsequent trilogy of poetry collections concerning rural life - Black Cart (2017), Bale Fire (2019) and Far Field (2023) - continued in this vein of often deeply moving minimalism. Perhaps the most extreme example of this sparse, stripped-back communication occurs in the poem "Silence" in Black Cart, where a farmer sees "falling market prices" but "says nothing", sees "feed stocks dwindle" and "animals sicken" but still "says nothing". Then, in the final stanza, we learn that the farmer's wife, concerned for his mental health, has buried his old shotgun where he won't find it, out "beyond the whins". She also "says nothing".
In his latest book, Knockan, Carruth returns to the verse novella form, this time to tell the story of an estranged mother and daughter spending a difficult week together on the mother's croft in Assynt. As in Killochries, the verbal exchanges are limited in scale but not in scope. A couple of brisk opening salvoes as the mother meets her daughter off the bus set the uncomfortable tone. The daughter's barb "Still wearing Dad's old cagoule, I see. / And have you lost your hairbrush?" is met with "You're one to talk, / still dressed like a student / after all this time."
If anything, the dialogue becomes even more pared-back as the days roll by, tensions rise, hostilities escalate, and we are gradually drip-fed information about the characters' troubled backstories. As in Killochries, however, the most telling exchanges tend to be those where almost nothing is said. The subject of the daughter's early pregnancy - guessed at by the mother - is finally broached when the pick-up won't start and the daughter offers to push. "Not in your condition," comes the mother's clipped reply, "I'll push". This brief episode finishes with the mother's interior monologue: "And that is that: / the unsaid said."
Divided up into the seven days the characters spend together, Knockan consists of many repeating layers, of which these mother-daughter interactions are only one. In a nod to the absent father's life as a geologist there are also regular passages detailing the various rock formations specific to the area; these, we eventually learn, are extracts of a taped lecture the father once gave which the mother now plays to herself as an act of remembrance.
Additionally, each day has a poem titled after a different Assynt mountain, from Suilven to Stac Pollaidh, each one placing mother and daughter in the context of their female relatives and ancestors. And then there's the deepest chronological layer of all: a passage charting the onset of an ice age and the gradual thaw that follows, appearing first (on Sunday) as eight lines at the bottom of an otherwise blank page, then (on Monday) growing to 12 lines, and continuing to expand every day thereafter - a poem-within-a-poem that slowly builds upwards, like so many layers of sedimentary rock.
Knockan, in other words, is not a book that gives up all its riches at once, but one that rewards careful reading and re-reading. There is, of course, a place for the kind of instant-gratification poetry that works as a viral TikTok video, but there is also, surely, a place for poetry like this: complex and polyphonic, dark and difficult. I'd love to hear it performed as a radio play, perhaps with a soundtrack composed by that musical master of buried meanings, Erland Cooper.
Knockan, by Jim Carruth, Tapsalteerie, £12
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