Why I was so bad at clay-pigeon shooting

By | 1 February 2015
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’ was first published in Magma 55 (2013)
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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 in Wales. He won the Callan Gordon Award as part of the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Awards (2013 / 14). His collaborations include work with Edinburgh Printmakers, cosmologists, electroacoustic composers, and particle physicists. He is poetry editor at the Glasgow Review of Books. ‘The Laws of the Game’ was the title poem of 17 commissioned from Glasgow poets on the occasion of the Commonwealth Games in July 2014.

More by Samuel Tongue on Cordite Poetry Review →

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