- Paperback: 128 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber; First Edition edition (20 May 1996)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571177611
- ISBN-13: 978-0571177615
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.6 x 1.2 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 765,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Christopher Logue has had the most varied and colourful poetic career. Escaping the drabness of post-war England for the freedoms and excitements of bohemian Paris, he started to write and publish poems as a member of the expatriate community which also included Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller. He then returned to London and participated in the cultural revolution of the sixties, writing song lyrics, inventing the poster poem and appearing at literary happenings. More recently he has devoted himself to a new English version of Homer's Iliad - 'the best translation of Homer since Pope's' (New York Review of Books) - three instalments of which have now been published by Faber. Selected Poems gives the reader, for the first time, a proper idea of Christopher Logue's lyrical gifts, as well as his irrepressible outspokenness and sense of artistic adventure. It contains fine poems which have been out of print for too long and others now regarded as classics.
About the Author
Christopher Logue was born in 1926. He was educated at Prior Park College, Bath, and at Portsmouth Grammar School. He served as a private in the Black Watch and spent sixteen months in an army prison. His publications include several volumes of poetry and a pornographic novel. He lives in London with his wife, the critic Rosemary Hill. The first collection of his reinterpretation of Homer's Iliad, War Music, was shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize; Cold Calls, the fifth instalment of the War Music series, won the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 2005.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Logue's Selected Poems: Contains Exclusive Installment of War Music, 30 Oct 2008
By Joe Kenney "buttergun" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Selected Poems of Christopher Logue (Paperback)
This book, published in 1996, features a selection of Christopher Logue's poetry spanning from his early work in the 1950s up to the 1990s. It includes such legendary poems as his "I Shall Vote Labour" as well as the "poem poster" material he fashioned. But what's most important is that this book culminates in an exclusive installment of Logue's decades-in-the-making War Music.
I've read countless books and Logue's War Music is my favorite of them all. An "account" of Homer's Iliad, it's basically a rewriting of the epic in contemporary poetry, and to tell the truth I prefer it to the original (though admittedly I can't read Attic Greek). Currently War Music lives in 3 volumes: the self-titled release, All Day Permanent Red, and Cold Calls. I've read that Logue is now working on the final installment; he's been working on it since Cold Calls was published in 2005. But sadly none of the above books includes the War Music installment featured here in Selected Poems; to read it, you'll need to buy this book.
An eight-page rewrite of Iliad Book 21, this is an epic in miniature, with Achilles battling the river-god Scamander. First off we see that this installment takes place later chronologically than anything in War Music Logue has yet published; the self-titled volume was heretofore the latest in the Iliad sequence, and it ended with Achilles taking up his divine armor, preparing to slaughter the Trojans. Here we meet him after he's well into a murderous frenzy; he's killed so many that Scamander complains of the corpses mucking up his waters.
All as in Homer, but Logue rewrites as he sees fit. Indeed, he relates most of the story with a prefacing "Prelude," then moves straight into Achilles boasting over his many dead. But this is a quick-moving tale, with Scamander nearly drowning Achilles, Athena and Poseidon offering the Greek moral support, and Hera sending her son Hephaestus to burn Scamander until he relents. And it's a tale filled with those Logue touches which make War Music such a marvel: Achilles graphically denigrating the recently-killed Asteropeus's inception, Hera lovingly calling Hephaestus "Little Cripple" as she instructs him to burn Scamander until she says to stop, the surrendering Scamander screaming of the Trojans "Let `em burn."
One happy day the final installment of War Music will be published, and on an even happier day the entire completed epic will be collected into one volume. When that day comes I hope Logue's publishers remember to include this forgotten installment.
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