Antler

Eric Gregory Award Winner The poems in Antler stalk their quarry over difficult ground. Prehistoric landscapes blend with genuine and imaginary anthropology; the real world becomes distorted through the dark mirrors of folktale and myth; fraudsters, liars, and con-men lurk perpetually in the shadows. This panorama is emotional, too, most vividly in the collections centrepiece: the sequence Vaisala and Sinuhe, charting an astronomy professors infatuation with one of his postgraduate students, who may or may not be a werewolf. Pared-down, playful and often very funny, Cleggs poetry keeps faith with what is tactile and tangible (moss, leather, bone), distilling plainspoken diction, luminous imagery and a unique worldview into lines which remain in the head for a long while after the book has been closed.