Macbeth in Venice (Poets, Penguin) by William Logan (2003-05-27)

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(Macbeth in Venice) Author: William Logan published on (June, 2003)

(One of the most technically gifted poets of his generatio...)

One of the most technically gifted poets of his generation, William Logan here presents four sequences, each of which is haunted by the battered history of the enchanted city of Venice: two refugees from Nazi Germany replay a version of the Aeneid that shadows their lives in and out of Venice; the comedy of Tiepolo's Punchinello drawings are given mocking narrative; a modern traveler finds in Venice's insects, birds, and fish a nature that endures within an unnatural city; and, in a formal sequence reminiscent of W. H. Auden's "The Sea and the Mirror," King James commissions a revision of Macbeth in order to impress the chief magistrate. These new poems showcase Logan's trademark refinement and erudition.

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Night Battle (Poets, Penguin)

(Breathtakingly intense poems about language, love, and th...)

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

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Sullen Weedy Lakes

(Ranging from acerbic couplets to solemnly tolling verse, ...)

Ranging from acerbic couplets to solemnly tolling verse, William Logan's newest book explores the soul of man in the soil of his society. In the world of Sullen Weedy Lakes, evolution is a downward spiral, and the changes of life "unhappy ripening." In poetry that is sobering and miraculous, Logan exposes man in his exile, where social order is oppression, and nature the mirror and mimic of his devastation. Logan the observer is often aloof, dryly detailing horrific tableaus, yet in the end he weaves the separate poems into a rare concern and modulated despair. Corruption, oppression, and disease, legitimized by the ghastly pastel stamp of commerce and greed, have mastered and monstered the age; but the sullen weedy lakes of history may yet be sailed by the common, triumphant moorhen. Working against the pale romance of contemporary American verse, Sullen Weedy Lakes is an accomplished collection by a poet of whose early work Richard Howard remarked, "These are the poems in Prospero's drowned book."

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Strange Flesh (Penguin Poets)

(A new collection from a poet acclaimed for his immaculate...)

A new collection from a poet acclaimed for his immaculate craft and impressive range William Logan?S dark, intense, muscular verse has long unsettled some of the standard agreements of American poetry. His eighth collection finds its home in the elsewhere, in the various small towns and ancient cities where the poet has felt some shimmering presence of the past. Logan uncovers the memory of the Leviathan in the Massachusetts fishing village where he was raised, the coupling of gods in Venice at the millennium, and signs of the Flood in Texas. He explores places familiar and unfamiliar, whether tenting on the plains with General Custer or seeing a horrific vision behind the Blaschkas? famous glass models of the invertebrates. The inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah followed strange flesh; in the collapsing real-estate market of the past, this master of formality as well as form discovers the sins of the flesh that still haunt us.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143114468/?tag=2022091-20

Macbeth in Venice

(One of the most technically gifted poets of his generatio...)

One of the most technically gifted poets of his generation, William Logan here presents four sequences, each of which is haunted by the battered history of the enchanted city of Venice: two refugees from Nazi Germany replay a version of the Aeneid that shadows their lives in and out of Venice; the comedy of Tiepolo's Punchinello drawings are given mocking narrative; a modern traveler finds in Venice's insects, birds, and fish a nature that endures within an unnatural city; and, in a formal sequence reminiscent of W. H. Auden's "The Sea and the Mirror," King James commissions a revision of Macbeth in order to impress the chief magistrate. These new poems showcase Logan's trademark refinement and erudition.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000H2N788/?tag=2022091-20

The Whispering Gallery

(The poems here delve into what William Logan calls the “i...)

The poems here delve into what William Logan calls the “ill-lit kingdom of the past.” The book is haunted by the dead but equally penitent toward the rich insinuations of the living: the lost floral paradise of the Florida outlands, the steamy Gatsby summers of a Long Island childhood, the frozen stones of a colonial burying ground. This new collection of seventy-two poems will allow readers to delight in the richness of Logan’s language and the boldness of his vision.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143036173/?tag=2022091-20