Inheritance Together we stand late in an autumn afternoon in the doorway to the byre father and son looking across the lands of High Auchensale to the long-shadowed milkers still grazing in the corner field and I the eldest, know I've walked away from all this. Not the partial commitment of relief milkings on Saturdays or a help at harvest time: I've turned down the full embrace of a life yoked to the soil as the guardian of the herd though we will not speak of it not now or ever letting our silence be a sign. For you are my father in much more than looks and my real inheritance is the handing down of being, a shared passion for what this place means. Neither of us live here any more, so each return journey is a reconnecting. And while we are able we'll always come back each of us to be judged in turn by what we pass on to others, but not now as we bring in the cows Away back, Get away back. Two voices in the failing light calling out together.

Jim Carruth was born in 1963 and grew up on his family's farm near Kilbarchan. He currently works across Scotland supporting community regeneration. "Jim Carruth's recent poetry is freighted with his and his family's experience of farming. The tone is elegiac, but the images are always sharp and vital. His is a rare voice these days - one that is engaged in making a poetic record of an intimate but changing relationship with the land. His poetry has an insider's eloquence and an eye to catch the physical eloquence that surrounded him." (Tom Pow) "In two short collections Jim Carruth has established the kind of distinctive voice that some poets struggle to achieve in a lifetime." (James Robertson) High Auchensale is available for £6 inc. p&p from http://www.scottish-pamphlet-poetry.com/index.cgi?publisher=23