News at Eleven: In "The Ram," a neighbor asks [Simon] Armitage

to help him in wringing the neck of a ram mortally wounded by a car:

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, spirograph shells of its horns
till its eyes, on stalks, looked back at its bones.

And so it ends, without editorial comment, but the reader flinches as Armitage, in a very Hughes-like move, expends his best aesthetic effort on the last two murderous lines.

from The New Republic: A New Head

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