Two Poems

Letters

Vol. 19 No. 13 · 3 July 1997

From Editors, ‘London Review’

In the issue of 5 June, the final line of Simon Armitage’s poem ‘The Ram’ was swallowed by our computer. The poem in full is as follows:

Half-dead, hit by a car, the whole of its form
a jiggle of nerves, like a fish on a lawn.
To help finish it off, he asked me to stand
on its throat, as a friend might ask a friend

to hold, with a finger, the twist of a knot.
Then he lifted its head, wheeled it about
by the ammonite, handlebar shells of its horns
till its eyes, on stalks, looked back at its bones.

Editors, ‘London Review’