William Logan

Biographical note:  William Logan has published eight books of poetry and five books of essays and reviews. Among his many awards are the Corrington Medal for Literary Excellence, the Allen Tate Prize, the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, the inaugural Randall Jarrell Prize for Poetry Criticism, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717170
ISBN:  9781844717170
Author:  William Logan
Title:  Deception Island
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Mar-11
Extent:  148pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  222 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 10.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  William Logan’s poetry has been called elegant, difficult, cranky, formidable, dazzling, intoxicating, and ominous. For almost forty years, he has published poems that do not fit comfortably with the work of most of his contemporaries, and perhaps do not want to fit at all. Deception Island, a selection from his first five books, is an introduction to the work of a poet who has taken a resistant pleasure in the Byzantine contrivance of Venice, in the empty vision of the American west, and in the romantic longing of British landscape.

Main description:  William Logan’s poetry has been called elegant, difficult, cranky, formidable, dazzling, intoxicating, and ominous. For almost forty years, he has published poems that do not fit comfortably with the work of most of his contemporaries, and perhaps do not want to fit at all. The poems in Deception Island, a selection from his first five books, find their souls in the soullessness of modern life — if he looks upon the present with a withering eye, he sees the roots of later darkness in the early sins of culture. He might be called a moral poet, if he were not so suspicious of the certainties of morality. Nonetheless, he takes a resistant pleasure in the Byzantine contrivance of Venice, in the empty vision of the American west, and in the romantic longing of British landscape. He is equally at home in the privileges of free verse and in the older metrical line, sometimes roughened into sensibility, and rarely heard now with such command or control. Logan has an impeccable ear, a darkening view, and a belief that the poet’s job is to work in language, to do things with words, without attempting to persuade or forgive. In his poems, the echoes of Lowell, Auden, and other modern masters can sometimes be heard; but he has fused his influences into a poetic line that is personal in the private wrestling with language that the poet must accept as his task.

Table of contents:
Contents
from Sad-faced Men
Deception Island
The Object
Observing Whales through Binoculars
Seventy-Six
Two Lives
Travel Report
Ice
The Man on the Bed
The Mantis
A Portrait by Bellocq
Tatiana Kalatschova
The Lizard in His Medium
from Difficulty
Clare and Silence
Arcanum
The Angels among the Liars
Money and Dürer
Black Harbor
Summer Island
Blue Yacht
Travel
Folly
Green Island
The King of Black Pudding
Flour Mites as Moral Beings
This Island
from Sullen Weedy Lakes
Moorhen
Capability Brown in the Tropics
The Rivers of England
Banana Republics
Debora Sleeping
Christ Church, Oxford / 26 October 1881
3-13 September 1752
The Underground
Racial Prejudice in Imperial Rome
Major Graves
To the Honourable Committee
James at Sixty
Haddocks’ Eyes
Ambassador of Imperfect Mood
from Vain Empires
The Secession of Science from Christian Europe
Christ among the Moneychangers, 1929
The Long Vacations
A Version of Pastoral
The Advent of Common Law in Littoral Pursuits
Florida Pest Control
The Shadow-Line
Van Gogh in the Pulpit
Britain without Baedeker
Tristes Tropiques
The Burning Man
Animal Actors on the English Stage after 1642
Flower, of Zimbabwe
Keats in India
from Night Battle
Florida in January
Sundays in the South
Mother on the St. Johns
from Long Island Sins
Blues for Penelope
Nothing
The English Light
Larkin
from Paradise Lost
Song
For the Hostages
The Words
Dear AC
Dear DD
My Father as Madame Butterfly
Pera Palas
Alexander Sarcophagus

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Excerpt from book:  

Nothing

Below us the gray fields of England
lie like sacks of cement
as I fill out the landing card
of Her Majesty's government.

A girl adrift under her Walkman
is sipping her father's vin blanc.
I turn to study the orange juice
and a new moon of stale croissant,

our "continental" breakfast.
I've paid with a handful of dimes
for the vodka spilled at my feet
on the crumpled New York Times.

A pale silver wrinkling, or kneading,
on the green Naugahyde of sea
disturbs the aluminum cowl
of the engine by GE,

and a coarse white whisker of ship
blinks in simple Morse code
the danger of scotch on the rocks
or ice on wet strings of road

across the stubble of Dartmoor
where black pools on western slopes
surround broken needles of light
that might be needles of hope.

We are tired, bloodless figures,
the waxworks of Madame Tussaud.
How little we really expect.
How less than little we know.

The bowmen who nocked their arrows
on the fields of Agincourt
protected these gas storage-tanks,
the docks of this tiny port,

the small rural railway-station,
the zipper of British Rail,
the consolation of life
built on HO scale,

the silver sigh of a river
squeezed from a tube of paint,
the chalky scar of high street
and a crossroads that stares like a saint.

I remember your dying, your anger,
alone in a hospital bed.
The dead help no one living
and the living no one dead.

In minutes we will be landing
at the airport of status quo.
We never escape very far
from the deaths that await us below.

Previous review quote:  Sad-faced Men (1982): Logan writes like an angel — an elegant, literary angel.

Donald Hall
Iowa Review

Previous review quote:  ‘The most hated man in American poetry,’ a title one could be proud of in this time of fawning and favor-trading.

Robert McDowell
Hudson Review

Previous review quote:  The unloveliness of some of the feelings to which Logan gives vent is refreshing, a counter to the melancholy transcendentalism of many of his contemporaries. He takes America personally. … Logan’s are never going to be the Nation’s Favourite Poems, but their presence reminds us of what poetry can include.

Sean O'Brien
TLS

Previous review quote:  Macbeth in Venice (2003): A construct of elegant thematic and formal irony…Logan’s strengths are those of a learned poet – a confident grasp of formal and thematic resource, an archivist’s love of the past and an impassioned concern for tradition.

J. T. Barbarese
New York Times Book Review

Previous review quote:  The Whispering Gallery (2005): In a very different vein, that scrupulous and at times ironic austerity distinguishes William Logan's new collection of poems, The Whispering Gallery. Its feelings are under pressure of exactitude and clarity. The flashes of humour are all the more telling.

George Steiner
TLS

Previous review quote:  William Logan’s work has frequently elicited comparison with W. H. Auden and Robert Lowell, and for good reason.

James Matthew Wilson
Notre Dame Review

Previous review quote:  Strange Flesh (2008): A hard-boiled formalist with a redoubtable aptitude for tersely fastidious diction and sinewy prosody whipped into fighting trim. … He can hold his own with just about anyone in vivisecting the vanity of human wishes with savage aplomb.

David Barber
New York Times Book Review