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Lucifer at Camlann & Amen to Artillery: Two Poems

LUCIFER AT CAMLANN

In the drear fen
of all scorn
like a tooth unsheathed I shone
for I too am the seed of the king.

Son of woman
of all crowns
the bruise is the hardest won.
To strike at your heel is no mean thing.

AMEN TO ARTILLERY
for Allan Peterson

This American English dictionary
is at its best in the volume with the word ‘American’.
So when I talk about Abraham’s knife at Isaac’s throat,
I don’t just mean antinomyas Kierkegaard might
(the wrongness of the thing which is nonetheless right)
but also the trace metal antimony that silver that bone
which is in the steel of the knife to steady it.


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

was born in 1986 and grew up in rural Sussex, a few minutes’ walk from Shelley’s boyhood home of Field Place. He received a major Eric Gregory Award in 2009 and a Hawthornden International Writer’s Fellowship in 2011. He has published a pamphlet, The English Sweats, with Pighog Press and is currently the Williams Librarian at Cranleigh School in Surrey, where also he teaches. Sins of the Leopard is his first full collection.

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