James Caruth’s debut collection A Stone’s Throw - the winner of the 2006 manuscript competition – is now available from Staple Press for £5.00 (free p&p). Orders should be sent to the usual address, or copies can be purchased through our online shop, here: James Caruth: A Stone’s Throw (£5 including P&P).
Biographical Note:
James Caruth was born in Belfast in 1953. Educated in Ireland and Liverpool, he later lived in South Africa for a number of years before finally settling in Sheffield. Caruth’s debut collection, A Stone’s Throw, was selected for inclusion in the ‘highly commended’ section of the 2008 Forward Anthology.
Praise for James Caruth:
“James Caruth writes with warmth and humanity. His poems are accurate reminders of what really matters in our relationships with each other and the natural world”
Jean Sprackland
“These poems are carefully crafted and moving. The work has a deceptively simple quality, confident and straightforward, yet lifted by neat shifts of tone and well-chosen turns of phrase.”
Roddy Lumsden
Three Poems by James Caruth
Where Lovers Walk
Stay lover, look through the eye of that bridge
see the unblinking eye of the next, their symmetry
reflected in this mirror. I’m thinking
you could incise this river’s silvered skin,
cut through its fluent bone and cartilage,
reach in a hand, trawl through maidenhair
the guts of rusted bikes and prams; go deeper still,
haul up those grimed, forgotten faces pouring
out from Hadfield’s early shift, a tributary
of molten men, who strolled this path to drink
the half-clean air; and further yet, until you touch
the river bed, then let your fingers sift the silt
of every long lost wish and pledge. Words,
the currency of lovers, like pennies in a well.
Allegiances
A hedged peninsula,
small fields crowded on either side,
here and there a glimpse of the Lough
through the sedge. A heron, dissident
and still as stone by the water’s edge.
The last hour we’ve left the city behind,
driving now through one horse towns
that wear their colours on each little street,
paint their allegiances on every wall;
in your face, plain as day. Each townland
a borderland. As the graffiti changes
and new flags uncurl from the roof of a barn,
the hills are rubbed out with rain.
Both of us, it seems, are lost in this country
where voices rub like pumice.
It’s then I want him to know why I left,
why I return, as if my heart was a lodestone
earthed here. But what comes is the memory
of this morning, his laughter when I cut myself shaving,
a sign of old age, he said. And it was.
That moment when you realise
you are no longer in control, that moment
when you know that what you want to do
and doing it, no longer run concurrent.
Alice in the Garden
Cape Town
She peers through a safety fence
at the pool’s blue desolation,
my feral daughter confined
to the garden’s puzzle.
On the day she was born
my restless heart went out
and never returned.
My eyes are tangled in her.
She roams the garden’s edges
and I am aware of phantoms;
the silent secrecy of cobras,
button spiders sewn in the dark foliage.
Tiptoeing by the hibiscus
she gives me a smile,
I bend my head,
accept the blessing.
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