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Samuel Tongue

Samuel Tongue was born in Bath and grew up on a pig farm in South Wales. After completing an English degree and a Masters in Creative Writing at Exeter University, he ventured briefly into ministerial training for the Anglican Church. He has published poems in numerous magazines including Magma, Gutter and The List. He won the Callan Gordon Award as part of the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Awards (2013 / 14). He is poetry editor at the Glasgow Review of Books.

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Why I was so bad at clay-pigeon shooting

It was cold. It was raining. I was tired.
I cried ‘Pull!’ and tightened, tried to follow the whirring discus 
to its apex, the point at which it would pause and begin its fall;
my eye filled with dark mountain,
the grey curve of two heron
sweeping back along the silver loch,
and the shotgun was an extension
of my ability to crush the world
in gunpowder and brass, and the recoil
went deeper than the soft socket of my shoulder. 

‘Why I was so bad at clay-pigeon shooting’© Samuel Tongue. First published in Magma #55 (2013). Reprinted by kind permission of the author. 
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