Logue's Homer: War Music

What a retelling of the Trojan War!  Achilles depicted as a bloodthirsty teen with an easily bruised ego.  Agamemnon depicted as a weasel but still King of kings.  Odysseus as a fatalist.  Priam as too decrepit even to understand what's happening to Troy.  Paris as considerably braver than we may be used to seeing him.  Hector as a little too late and a little too confused about the way things are.  Helen?  Perfectly willing to go back to Menelaos, who has a legitimate complaint with Ilium.

Technically daring style, too.  Here's a cinematically spare description of the changing colors of a sunrise over the Trojan plain:

"Rat.

Pearl.

Onion.

Honey."

What's most fun is how Logue updates the Homeric image, without losing the Homeric tone:

"The quadraphonic ox-horns hit their note."

"Fierce chrome.  Weapon-grade chrome."

And on the self-deluding qualities of the warrior . . .

"Now I shall ask you to imagine how
Men under discipline of death prepare for war.
There is much more to it that armament,
And kicks from those who could not catch an hour's sleep
Waking the ones who dozed like rows of spoons;
Or those with everything to lose, the kings,
Asleep like pistols in red velvet.

"Moments like these absolve the needs deividing men.
Whatever caught and brought and kept them here
Is lost: and for awhile they join in terrible equality,
Are virtuous, self-sacrificing, free:
And so insidious is this liberty
That those serving it will bear
An even greater servitude to its root:
Believing they were whole, while they were brave;
That they were rich, because their loot was great;
That war was meaningful, because they lost their friends."

This book ends with a magnificent image of Achilles speeding toward the walls of Troy for the fight with Hector.  Logus doesn't bother to record it; we know how this turns out.  He's with his driver in a chariot pulled by two white horses which are running at a full gallop, their hooves barely touching the sand.  Achilles speaks to them, admonishing them not to leave his body behind as they left Patroclus' body to the Trojans, when the fight is over.  (He knows how this fight turns out, too.)  Here's the amazing image: one of the horses, in mid-gallop, turns its head and speaks back to Achilles, admonishing him in turn, that they are doing God's work, not Achilles'.  And then the final line, "Someone has left a spear stuck in the sand," to punctuate the end of the story.

Two years after publishing War Music, Logue came out with All Day Permanent Red, part of his ongoing recounting of the Iliad in modern terms.  If you like battle scenes (who doesn't, after Saving Private Ryan?), and if you've read with interest the many many many fight scenes in any good translation of The Iliad (I can only imagine the power in the original!), you'll love this for it's muscularity.

A form of optimism

I have a form of optimism about poetry: it rises above awards.  Roy Jacobstein's A Form of Optimism wallows in them, a hog-heaven of them.  I picked this volume up at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill the other night and gave it a read.  The poems are competent, even good, in a workshop-clever way.  They are so standard that I could have sworn, while browsing in the bookshop, that I'd read stuff by the poet before.  And I may have, somewhere, sometime.  But I think that feeling of familiarity comes from having read this type of stuff so many times in so many standard reviews over so many years. 

The voice, the speaker's "presence" in every poem, the nice turn of phrase, the interminable focus on the small and local and intimate--the moment--the finding of meaning in the daily and otherwise unnoticed; it's all the stuff of poetry workshops, of professionalism, the curse of William Carlos Williams upon so many succeeding generations: no ideas but in things.

This poet is everywhere in his poems.  He (his voice, his point of view, his experience, his conclusions, his lessons) is inescapable.  In a book of poems ostensibly "about" exotic foreign scenes and cultures, you get hardly the sense of the poetry or the culture--only of the observer and the recorder and what he has chosen to record.  It's a book about Roy Jacobstein: "Looky! Oh, look what I saw while traveling through this place!"  This place being anything from a dusty road in village Africa to a landscape in the poet's own family history.  A book of verse?  Certainly.  A purply-travelogue?  Most certainly.

The poems all attack their topics like a seminar assignment, making meaning after meaning after meaning.  Like wonderfully behaved children, they establish scene, develop complication, build tension, resolve through some denouement, then conclude with a moral, usually implied, and a moral often so obvious as not to need verbalizing. One after another.  Like bon bons, the first two or three are delicious and make you want more, which you can't resist, until soon the tongue is sugar-coated and the stomach sour.  Sugar shock!

You'll do anything for something trivial and meaningless.

But these are all award-winning pieces--the book won the Morse Prize for 2011--and many of it's poems were first published in the best reviews: Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, The Indiana Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly.  Everything about the book, as a publication, shouts "I am a book of award-winning poems!" from every part: the front cover, the back cover, the frontispiece, title page, the biographical back page.  What bona fides!

But read the poems.  Jeez, buy the book.  Support the enterprise even if it stoops again and again to the "awarded."  Only, don't mistake the treatment of safe themes (life is unfair, the West is cruel and clueless, death is among us, it's hard and even unsafe to be different or think different, there's a big exotic world out there and here let me introduce it to you) in a safe manner for what it isn't: poetry.

Last July . . . soon after I left England . . . and turned a very sharp corner

My Ex

—poem at my 60^th birthday

My ex warned me this day would come.

It says so here in this note:

“I am warning you this day has come.

And look what you’ve turned into!

Look at your puffy face, that

awful stoop, those haggard eyes.

Look at the defeat. 

What have you done to me?” 

My ex admonishes me.

It’s the way of all exes: the I-told-you-so’s

and heartless kiss-offs, the vengeful little missives

unopened in the drawer for all these years.

Well, vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,

and so I look deeply into the mirror. Why, I am a god.