I am grateful to the editors of the following publications, in which sections of this work first appeared:
Little Star, Paris Lit Up (Paris), Ecotone, Bright Hill Press
25th Anniversary Anthology, Middlelost (online), and Cagibi (online).
My primary debts of gratitude are reflected in the poem’s dedication. I also want to express here my unbounded thanks to some of the many individuals who have offered insights, comments, and suggestions on this work as it evolved over time:
to Elisabeth Lewis Corley and Joseph Megel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for their development of the multimedia performance piece Geomancy in 2014; and also to the improvisational dance group AGA Collaborative, who co-created that work with them;
to David Mahan at Yale Divinity School, and to Richard Deming, Nancy Kuhl, Henry Sussman, and others at the Yale Working Group on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, for their meticulous attention to sacred landscape, contemporary poetry, and this piece of poetic work in particular;
to Joseph Donahue and David Need at Duke University, and to Jessica Burstein at the University of Washington/Seattle, for their critical feedback and support;
to the poets Maeve Kinkead, J. J. Penna, Alicia Jo Rabins, Maggie Schwed, and Abby Wender, who took the king’s shilling and signed on with me for the duration of the War;
to my Comrade-in-the-Military-Archives Nathaniel Tarn, whose Avia, surely in some way this poem’s close cousin, I recently discovered;
to Paul Evans and Steve Hookins at the Royal Artillery Museum Archives in Woolwich, for their guidance in my search for original maps and materials (and for my special after-hours tour of the guns and their ghosts);
to the serving and retired military officers, British, Canadian, and American, whose responses to the poem have been illuminating and sustaining;
to my husband, Chip Loomis, and our sons, William and Sam, for their support (and patience) during my repeated absences in Flanders;
to the gracious, helpful, and understanding staff of the Ariane Hotel in Ieper/Ypres;
and to the numerous fellow Great War pilgrims I have met on the ground in Belgium, France, and the U.K.