Night Battle (Poets, Penguin) - Softcover

Logan, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140587985 ISBN 13: 9780140587982

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1999

Synopsis

Breathtakingly intense poems about language, love, and the loss of purity in the world

Logan's newest work, The Night Battle, reveals to readers a rich, sensuous world where even pigeons "roost in judgment" like "mottled, maculate angels" and Long Island mothers lounge at a swimming club drinking the politeness of servants "like a sin" while "summer broke the dark with lightning storms." A section of the book entitled "Milton's Tongue" finds an old college "gaudy with painted ghosts" and an ancient church filled with "antique lives we have no common language with, except that they too were lies." Donald Hall, writing in the Iowa Review, said, "Logan writes like an angel--an elegant, literary angel." Indeed, Logan's world is populated not only by angels, but also by the lost souls of great poets and humble country people alike--it is a rich, sensuous world aching to retain beauty in a landscape pocked by sin.

Like Ovid on the Black Sea, the restless stranger
might feel such cruel beauty monotonous.
But, inshore, a crusty alligator steams,
nosing into reeds to let off passengers
or take on canvas sacks of mail,
as if the weather had never once been tender
or required, like love, a moment of surrender.
--from "Florida in January"

* Logan's last collection, Vain Empires, was a New York Times Notable Book

About this title

About the Author

William Logan is the author of five collections of poems, a book of criticism, and a book of essays on poets and poetry. He has won the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from The Academy of American Poets and has received the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. He teaches at the University of Florida, where he is alumni professor of English.

From Publishers Weekly

Technically skillful, well-traveled and impressively knowledgeable, Logan (Vain Empires) couples a welcome faculty for observation with a narrow range of sour emotions in his fifth book of poems, many of which invoke earlier poets Logan admires. In sonnets, tercets, ballad-stanzas, blank verse, even in blues ("Blues for Penelope"), Logan draws heavily on Robert Lowell and on Elizabeth Bishop to find verbal equivalents for resentment and disappointment. "Reading the Greek Gospels" glowers in the wrathful tones of the early Lowell: "Raw Christians call the parish to account/ for bearish interest in the judgement day... The neighbor cats walk snarling through the mire." The later Lowell's aphoristic tendencies pervade several travel poems focused on personal and political disillusion and decline, from short work set in England and Florida (where Logan teaches) to the concluding sequence, "The Fall of Byzantium." Logan's attempts at Bishop's revelatory similes falter after his heavy-handed endings: English landscape, seen from the air, divulges an unsurprising truthA"We never escape very far/ from the deaths that await us below." Elegies to Bishop and to Amy Clampitt imitate those poets' styles more directly, while Logan's sonnets about famous people and places owe much to late-1930s Auden: "The maps were old; the X had been erased/ that marked the valley of their chosen fate." Logan does best in his well-crafted ballad stanzas, whose chief precedents (Bishop and Derek Walcott) don't prevent him from finding original music. "Small Bad Town" discovers the perfect words for an endless disconsolate suburb, still stuck in the 1950s: "The fractional white moons/ of the satellite dishes/ bother the broken noons/ and the mortal wishes// of the local housewife/ burning from her soaps./ Time sends invitations/ in little envelopes." (Oct.) FYI: Also in October, the UP of Florida will publish Reputations of the Tongue: On Poets and Poetry, a collection of Logan's essays and reviews. ($34.95 288p ISBN 0-8130-1697-5)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0140587985
• ISBN 13: 9780140587982
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 95