Amazon.com Review
Like his great predecessor
Randall Jarrell--who, as Robert Lowell famously noted, "had a deadly
gift for killing what he despised"--William Logan has a real genius for wielding the critical truncheon. Yet he never descends to merely petulant potshotting. Even the devastating one-liners scattered throughout
Reputations of the Tongue are the product of a rigorous and reflective mind. They are also irresistibly quotable, for their wisdom or comic pungency or both: "Auden began as a major poet and ended as a minor one, the first since Wordsworth to achieve such negative inversion." "The hysterical voice of Allen Ginsberg's
Howl seems, a quarter of a century later ... no more threatening than a cap pistol." "Reading Michael Palmer's poetry is like listening to serial music or slamming your head against a streetlight stanchion--somewhere, you're sure, masochists are lining up to enjoy the very same thing; but for most people the only pleasure it can have is the pleasure of its being over."
As the previous quote should make clear, the Language Poets are not William Logan's cup of tea. His reluctance to mince words or engage in the odd bit of logrolling has made him a figure of controversy, and at least one Pulitzer Prize winner has offered to run him over with a truck. Here and there it's impossible not to pity the hapless poet who has flapped and fluttered into the bug zapper of Logan's sensibility. Yet it's important to note that he's no less eloquent when it comes to praise. Reputations of the Tongue contains ardent assessments of Geoffrey Hill, W.D. Snodgrass, James Merrill, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and Donald Justice, and even a lesser book from the likes of Seamus Heaney provokes a shrug of awe from this habitual skeptic: "Poets this good are natural forces, like avalanches. They cannot be argued with--one can only get out of their way." And finally, in "The Condition of the Individual Talent," itself a leapfrogging update of Eliot's famous essay, Logan produces a classic formulation of why poetry matters in the first place:
Every poem of value must have a residue. A residue is not a mystery or a withholding. It is the result of a continual ignition in the language, a combustion in the nearness of words--it is what lies beneath the surface value of words. We can wear out a poem as we wear out a favorite jacket or joke. In a minor poem the residue is small and easily exhausted, but in the greatest it suffers a constant renewal. It cannot be exhausted because our lives are not long enough to do so. Indeed, in the greatest poetry the residue may seem to increase as our experience increases--that is, as we become more ruefully sensitive to the fire in its familiar words.
At this level, criticism too is a kind of a renewable resource. And the formidable, flammable prose on display in
Reputations of the Tongue is likely to last as long as the art it celebrates.
--James Marcus
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)
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