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Logan, William

Gardening & Landscape Design

Penguin??Books

Breathtakingly intense poems about language, love, and the loss of purity in the worldLogan'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 strangermight feel such cruel beauty monotonous. But, inshore, a crusty alligator steams, nosing into reeds to let off passengersor take on canvas sacks of mail, as if the weather had never once been tenderor required, like love, a moment of surrender.--from "Florida in January"* Logan's last collection, Vain Empires, was a New York Times Notable Book

Night Battle (Poets, Penguin)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

In words that are both disturbing and intense, a collection of poetry finds the Roman poet Ovid in London, Romeo and Juliet in Florida, and vanity corrupting everything in its path from the classical period to the Age of Television. Original.

Vain Empires (Poets, Penguin)

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.

Macbeth in Venice (Penguin Poets)

United States

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.

The Whispering Gallery

Penguin

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.

Strange Flesh (Penguin Poets)

A new collection by one of our foremost masters of free verse as well as formal poetry. The moody poems in Madame X, the author’s tenth collection, find their subjects in the byways of the past two centuries. Henry James visits his birthplace, the most beautiful woman in Europe ends up in a barrel at a fun fair, and a minor writer succumbs to tuberculosis at a German spa. In the title poem, the portrait of Madame X offers our century a lesson in seduction; but such public shows are balanced by poems of private desire, of whispers, of age, of the present always vanishing before us. These densely figured poems, rich in language and appointment, argue for a knowledge not sustained by the everyday. This is a triumphant collection of shimmering intensities and hard truths. National Book Critics Circle Award winner William Logan is one of the most technically gifted poets of his generation; his work has frequently elicited comparison to W. H. Auden and Robert Lowell, and has been called brilliant, formidable, passionate, and cranky. Donald Hall has written of him that “he writes like an angel–an elegant, literary angel,” and Sven Birkerts has commented that “he is like the eel in the well–a purifying agent.” This new volume of fifty-four poems displays Logan’s trademark refinement and classicism.

Madame X (Penguin Poets)

New work from a poet who "seems to be getting stronger with each collection" (David Yezzi, The New Criterion) William Logan is widely admired as one of our foremost masters of free verse as well as formal poetry; his classical verve conjures up the past within the present and the foreshadowings of the present within the past. In their sculptural turns, their pleasure in the glimmerings of the sublime while rummaging around in the particular, the poems in Rift of Light, Logan's eleventh collection, are a master class of powerful feeling embedded in language. Ranging from Martin Luther to an abandoned crow, from a midwife toad to a small-town janitor, from actress Louise Brooks to Dürer's stag beetle, Logan shows an encyclopedic attention to the passing world. Dry, witty, skeptical, these dark and acidic poems prove a constant and informing delight.

Rift of Light (Penguin Poets)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

William Logan has been called both the "preeminent poet-critic of his generation" and the "most hated man in American poetry." For more than a quarter century, in the keen-witted and bare-knuckled reviews that have graced the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement (London), and other journals, William Logan has delivered razor-sharp assessments of poets present and past. Logan, whom James Wolcott of Vanity Fair has praised as being "the best poetry critic in America," vividly assays the most memorable and most damning features of a poet's work. While his occasionally harsh judgments have raised some eyebrows and caused their share of controversy (a number of poets have offered to do him bodily harm), his readings offer the fresh and provocative perspectives of a passionate and uncompromising critic, unafraid to separate the tin from the gold. The longer essays in The Undiscovered Country explore a variety of poets who have shaped and shadowed contemporary verse, measuring the critical and textual traditions of Shakespeare's sonnets, Whitman's use of the American vernacular, the mystery of Marianne Moore, and Milton's invention of personality, as well as offering a thorough reconsideration of Robert Lowell and a groundbreaking analysis of Sylvia Plath's relationship to her father. Logan's unsparing "verse chronicles" present a survey of the successes and failures of contemporary verse. Neither a poet's tepid use of language nor lackadaisical ideas nor indulgence in grotesque sentimentality escapes this critic's eye. While railing against the blandness of much of today's poetry (and the critics who trumpet mediocre work), Logan also celebrates Paul Muldoon's high comedy, Anne Carson's quirky originality, Seamus Heaney's backward glances, Czeslaw Milosz's indictment of Polish poetry, and much more. Praise for Logan's previous works: Desperate Measures (2002)"When it comes to separating the serious from the fraudulent, the ambitious from the complacent, Logan has consistently shown us what is wheat and what is chaff.... The criticism we remember is neither savage nor mandarin.... There is no one in his generation more likely to write it than William Logan."―Adam Kirsch, Oxford American Reputations of the Tongue (1999)"Is there today a more stringent, caring reader of American poetry than William Logan? Reputations of the Tongue may, at moments, read harshly. But this edge is one of deeply considered and concerned authority. A poet-critic engages closely with his masters, with his peers, with those whom he regards as falling short. This collection is an adventure of sensibility."―George Steiner "William Logan's critical bedevilments-as well as his celebrations-are indispensable."―Bill Marx, Boston Globe All the Rage (1998)"William Logan's reviews are malpractice suits."―Dennis O'Driscoll, Verse "William Logan is the best practical critic around."―Christian Wiman, Poetry

The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin

Reference

Columbia University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Logan, William. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Logan, William

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Logan, William. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Gardener's Book of Sources

Night Battle (Poets, Penguin)

Vain Empires (Poets, Penguin)

Macbeth in Venice (Penguin Poets)

The Whispering Gallery

Strange Flesh (Penguin Poets)

Madame X (Penguin Poets)

Rift of Light (Penguin Poets)

The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin

The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin