Knockan

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. Rooted in the landscape and geology of North-West Scotland, this beautifully written and heart-breaking novel-in-verse is an original and powerful exploration of how our lived experience weighs on us, intimately told through the fracturing and repair of a mother and daughter relationship. 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