Christopher Logue (1926-2011) R.I.P.

(c) Jackson, Getty Images

I was saddened to recently learn that the British poet, Christopher Logue, died on December 2, 2011.  On December 10th, The New York Times ran a terrific obituary for Mr. Logue, and I've included a link to it here.  My first encounter with Logue's poetry occurred during my literary exploration of the various translations of Homer's The Iliad.  In fact, since 1959, Christopher Logue has been working on his interpretation or adaptation of significant portions of The Iliad, using his spare, but image-rich poetry to retell this great classic.

If you're looking to acquire all of Mr. Logue's 'Iliad' poetry, here is what you'll need to find--

War Music--An Account of Books 1-4 & 16-19 of Homer's 'Iliad' (1997);
All Day Permanent Red--The First Battle Scenes of Homer's 'Iliad' (2003); and
Cold Calls--War Music Continued (2005)

These three volumes of poetry are shelved with my seven different translations of The Iliad, and with Alice Oswald's Memorial (written about here) and David Malouf's beautiful novel Ransom.  They most certainly do all belong together on the shelf.

If you're interested in learning more about Christopher Logue, his poetry, and his 'Iliad' project, you might be interested in reading my review and assessment of All Day Permanent Red--The First Battle Scenes of Homer's 'Iliad' Rewritten here.  While a mere fifty pages in length, this thin volume holds some amazingly powerful poetry.  It proceeds relentlessly at near breakneck speed, and leaves the reader panting and gasping for air about an hour later as the last page is turned.

Somehow I think recounting Logue's portrayal of the Myrmidon's bearing the dead body of their comrade-in-arms, Patroclus, is appropriate--

"Starred sky. Calm sky.
Only the water's luminosity
Marks the land's end.

A light is moving down the beach.
It wavers. Comes towards the fleet.
The hulls like upturned glasses made of jet.

Is it a god?

No details

Yet.

Now we can hear a drum.

And now we see it:
Six warriors with flaming wands,
Eight veteran bearers, and one prince,
Patroclus, dead, crossed axes on his chest,
Upon a bier.
Gold on the wrists that bear the prince aloft.
Tears on the cheeks of those who lead with wands.
Multiple injuries adorn the corpse.
And we, the army, genuflect in line."

(War Music, pages 196-197)

Requiescat in pace, Mr. Logue, your voice will be missed.

***

Review: "Memorial" by Alice Oswald

Here we are just a few days removed from "Remembrance Day" (UK) and "Veteran's Day" (US), and somehow it seems highly appropriate that I have just finished reading a new book-length poem entitled, Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad, by the British poet, Alice Oswald.  Oswald's poem deeply affected me in a fashion similar to that that has occurred upon each of my visits to the Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C.  Now, let me see if I can explain why.

First of all, let me make myself clear, that while war, it seems, is a necessary evil and has been with us since the dawn of Humanity, this post is not about the morality, or immorality, of war.  What I want to briefly focus on is the human cost, and how that cost is recorded and remembered, i.e., memorialized.  Many countries have special days that commemorate their war dead, battles won, or wars fought.  Most countries have physical monuments or memorials too, from the small monuments in village squares or parks, to those grand and elaborate national monuments typically found in capital cities.  There's another type of memorial that some of us encounter through the course of our lives, and that is through the literature we read.  For example, many of us have read Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, or Willa Cather's One of Ours, or Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, just to name a few; and they all, to one degree or another, describe the horrors and futility of war, and memorialize, if you will, its impacts upon the combatants.  Over the ages, poetry has also been effectively utilized in a similar fashion, and one of the very first poems to deal directly with war and its costs is The Iliad by Homer.  This is the subject of Alice Oswald's poem, Memorial.

The poem starts with eight pages of a list of names--214 names--all in uppercase.  This is a listing of each death described by Homer in The Iliad and presented in the chronological order in which it appears in the poem.  It is staggering to slowly come to the realization that Homer has described 214 individual combat deaths through the course of nearly 16,000 lines of poetry.  To see that long list of names, on page after page after page, could not but help instantly transport me to the National Mall to stand in front of the Vietnam Memorial looking at the chronological ordering of the 58,272 names (all in uppercase too) of those who lost their lives during the Vietnam War from 1959 through 1975.  Oswald's listing of these names, one after the other, is an incredibly powerful and visceral mechanism for instantly engaging her reader.  There's none of the bickering between Achilles and Agamemnon here, the speech-making of Odysseus, or even the divine intervention of the gods.  Nope, Oswald instantly starts the reader off with the stark and undeniable cost of that messy little war on the Trojan Plain--in human lives.

PROTESILAUS
ECHEPOLUS
ELEPHENOR
SIMOISIUS
LEUKOS
DEMOCOON
DIORES
PIROUS
PHEGEUS
IDAEUS...

And on and on it goes.  After the list, Ms. Oswald moves straight into her poem, and what she has done is eloquently embrace and adapt Homer's vignettes of information that he provides in the poem about many of the men that are killed.  A poignant example of the grace and sensitivity that Oswald brings to telling the story of these dead men is in the first one--

The first to die was PROTESILAUS
A focused man who hurried to darkness
With forty black ships leaving the land behind
Men sailed with him from those flower-lit cliffs
Where the grass gives growth to everything
Pyrasus  Iton  Pteleus  Antron
He died in mid-air jumping to be first ashore
There was his house half-built
His wife rushed out clawing her face
Podarcus his altogether less impressive brother
Took over command but that was long ago
He's been in the black earth now for thousands of years

Whew!  In twelve concise lines we see a man with a life in a pastoral land that was his, he had a house (half-built), and a wife, and then he sailed off to war with his men and his brother.  And then he is dead.  Sounds eerily like the story of the men that sailed off and then participated in the Normandy Invasion on D-Day, and now lie in the earth near the Omaha Beachhead.

Oswald's Memorial respectfully, even reverently, yet relentlessly brings the reader front-and-center with each of the deaths in Homer's epic, through the slaughter that Diomedes wreaks upon the Trojans in Book 5; the death of Zeus' beloved son, Sarpedon, at the hands of Patroclus in Book 16, quickly followed by Patroclus' own death; and culminating with the last death, that of the Trojan great, Hector, killed by Achilles in Book 22.  In between these more 'famous' deaths are all of the others, one after the other, after the other.  Also, in an effort to provide a momentary respite or interlude from the carnage of killing and death, Oswald has masterfully utilized her own version of Homer's similes.  These similes, always presented twice consecutively, give the reader a well-needed moment for pause and internal reflection.  At times, Oswald's lines of poetry are humorous, and then others are unbearably sad.  This is, I think, a poem about life at the moment of death--a celebration of the life, and a memorial to the death.  Oswald herself says that the poem is like something "from the Greek tradition of lament poetry", and that her poem presents The Iliad as "a kind of oral cemetery...an antiphonal account of man in his world."  Maybe it is fitting that I close this review with the death of Hector "Breaker of Horses"--

And HECTOR died like everyone else
He was in charge of the Trojans
But a spear found out the little patch of white
Between his collarbone and his throat
Just exactly where a man's soul sits
Waiting for the mouth to open
He always knew it would happen
He who was so boastful and anxious
And used to nip home deafened by weapons
To stand in full armour in the doorway
Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running
All women loved him
His wife was Andromache
One day he looked at her quietly
He said I know what will happen
And an image stared at him of himself dead
And her in Argos weaving for some foreign woman
He blinked and went back to his work
Hector loved Andromache
But in the end he let her face slide from his mind
He came back to her sightless
Strengthless expressionless
Asking only to be washed and burned
And his bones wrapped in soft cloths
And returned to the ground

Just as Homer lovingly describes the intimacy of the feelings between the Trojan husband and wife (Book 6), Oswald's modern verse reinterprets those hopes, desires, and fears within Hector's death scene in a few starkly spare lines in such a fashion that one almost feels as though you are standing there witnessing his last living moments.  It is powerful stuff!  This is experiential poetry in the truest sense, as Oswald forces the reader to confront one of the primary elements of The Iliad--Men killing, and Men dying.

I have a shelf that contains seven different translations of Homer's The Iliad, as well as the three thin volumes of Christopher Logue's brilliant poetic reinterpretation (discussed here), and David Malouf's gorgeous little novel Ransom (reviewed here).  Alice Oswald's beautifully moving poem, Memorial, will be joining that company, as a monument to those 214 men who died on the Scamander Plain nearly 4,000 years ago.  Somehow, I think Homer would see this as quite fitting.

Memorial
By Alice Oswald
Faber and Faber Limited, 2011.
84 pages.

***

Veteran's Day--"And There Was a Great Calm" by Thomas Hardy

'And There Was a Great Calm'
(On the Signing of the Armistice, November 11, 1918)

I
There had been years of Passion--scorching, cold,
And much Despair, and Anger heaving high,
Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold,
Among the young, among the weak and old,
And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, "Why?"

II
Men had not paused to answer. Foes distraught
Pierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness,
Philosophies that sages long had taught,
And Selflessness, were as an unknown thought,
And "Hell!" and "Shell!" were yapped at Lovingkindness.

III
The feeble folk at home had grown full-used
To "dug-outs," "snipers," "Huns," from the war-adept
In the mornings heard, and at evetides perused;
To day--dreamt men in millions, when they mused--
To nightmare-men in millions when they slept.

IV
Waking to wish existence timeless, null,
Sirius they watched above where armies fell;
He seemed to check his flapping when, in the lull
Of night a boom came thencewise, like the dull
Plunge of a stone dropped into some deep well.

V
So, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowly
Were dead and damned, there sounded "War is done!"
One morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly,
"Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly,
And in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?"

VI
Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance
To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,
As they had raised it through the four years' dance
Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;
And murmured, "Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?"

VII
Aye; all was hushed. The about-to-fire fired not,
The aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song.
One checkless regiment slung a clinching shot
And turned. The Spirit of Irony smirked out, "What?
Spoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?"

VIII
Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,
No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,
No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;
Worn horses mused: "We are not whipped to-day";
No weft-winged engines blurred the moon's thin horn.

IX
Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery:
The Sinister Spirit sneered: "It had to be!"
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, "Why?"

(First published in Late Lyrics, by Thomas Hardy, 1922)

***

A Poem for the Day: An Excerpt from "All Day Permanent Red" by Christopher Logue

Whoo-Whee!  I have something new and definitely very, very different to share with all of my readers.  As all of you know, I am still working my way through many of the classics of ancient Greece.  The more I have read, the more I have discovered and realized that these ancient poems and plays are truly the foundation and building blocks of much of the great works of literature that we all read today.

These are some of the oldest recorded works in what we call the western canon, and the connections, themes, and ideas from these early works are clearly evident in subsequent literary works from antiquity all the way to the present.  Authors and poets, over the centuries, have reached back to these classics as they tell their own tales.  It never fails but to amaze me when I find these connections in whatever novel or poem I happen to be reading, or as I'm reading one of the Greek tragedies, I realize that I've seen the plot spun out as a poem by Keats, or a satirical novella by Margaret Atwood.

Well, what I have for you now is a bit of an epic modern poem that bridges the span of nearly 2,500 years back to Homer's The Iliad.  Since 1959, a British poet, Christopher Logue has been slowly but steadily working on his own interpretation of The Iliad.  He has carefully studied most, if not all, of the English-language translations, and has crafted his version, and published it in bits and pieces over the past nearly fifty years.  Of the 24 books in The Iliad, I think he has retold about a dozen so far.  I don't know if he plans to retell each and every book, but I believe he does intend upon publishing a combined, or unified, interpretation of his vision of The Iliad for our time.

I have three of Logue's books of poetry retelling portions of The Iliad, including the following:

War Music--An Account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer's Iliad (University of Chicago Press, 1997);
All Day Permanent Red--The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); and
Cold Calls--War Music Continued (Faber & Faber, 2005).

All I can tell you is that this is some of the most visceral and shockingly intense poetry that I've read in a long, long time.  It is poetry that is elegant, beautiful, biting, emotionally gut-wrenching, painful, humorous, lyrical, cinematic, and extraordinarily powerful.  It screams to be read aloud, and it screams to be shared with everybody.  On my train home from work tonight, I had an uncontrollable urge to stand up in the car and just begin reading out loud--I didn't, but maybe I should have.

I'm going to dip into Logue's second book, All Day Permanent Red--The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad for the bit of his work I'm sharing here.  The material covered by Logue in this volume is that generally contained in Books 4 and 5 of The Iliad.  What a great title too--"All Day Permanent Red"--to describe the vicious and desperate hand-to-hand combat between the Achaean and Trojan warriors; but Logue apparently took the title for this slim volume from an old Revlon lipstick advertisement!  It reminds me very much of the statement a veteran of the American Civil War made as he recalled the combat at the Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862), "...that for a moment in his mind's eye the landscape around him turned red."

Without further ado, here is an excerpt from this brilliant poem--

All Day Permanent Red--The First Battle Scenes from Homer's Iliad

"Headlock. Body slam. Hands that do not reach back. Low dust.
Stormed by Chylabborak, driven in by Abassee
The light above his circle hatched with spears
Odysseus to Sheepgrove:

'Get lord Idomeneo from the ridge.'

Then prays:

'Brainchild Athena, Holy Girl,
As one you made
As calm and cool as water in a well.
I know that you have cares enough
Other than those of me and mine.
Yet, Daughter of God, without your help
We cannot last.'

Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly
Emptying her blood-red mouth set in her ice-white face
Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked:
'Kill! Kill for me!
Better to die than to live without killing!'

Who says prayer does no good?

Seeing Athena's cry raise fight and fire in lord Odysseus,
Hera, Heaven's creamy Queen, told Diomed
(Still near the strip, content amid the crackle of snapped spears):

'Odysseus needs you. Go.'

Beneath a rise
300 paces downslope from
Chylabborak and Abassee
A party of 500 wandering Greeks
See Hector parked and praying:

'Lord of Light...'

While Lutie fills a bucket from the well
Where the Skean road that runs from Troy
Straight up the slope to the ridge
Crosses the track.

'...I shall be busy until dark.
If I forget you, do not you, me.'

Out from the wanderers the Teucer boys
Iolo, 16, from a wife, and Parthenos
Bred from a she Teucer inherited
Come crouch-down hurrying convinced that this
Their chance for fame Prince Hector dead etc. has come.
Parthenos set to plant his spear by Hector's spine,
Iolo, well...

Boy Lutie is astonished by their impudence
But not enough to not, in one,
Put down the bucket thrash his whip, its crack
Recalling Hector to his fate, its tip--as Parthenos
Jumped for the chariot's tailgate
And Hector's mittened hand snaffled his wispy beard--
Circling Iolo's wrist.

Parthenos kisses Hector's wrist.
His eyes are full of words.

'Take a deep breath before you speak, Greek boy.'

He does.

'Please, Prince of the Gate, take us alive.
We did not want to come to Troy.
We could not disobey our father's words.
His mother was your aunt Hesione.
He has a wall of swords--'
'With silver hilts,' Iolo says--
'And gold--a chest of gold.
Please. Please. Please. Please.'

The wanderers edge in.

Hector steps down.
The Teucer boys may not have been the brightest on the slope
But they are bright enough to know death when they see it.
'Keep your lives,' he said. 'A gift from Troy.'
And as they ran, made
'Go' to Lutie with his head,
Studied the wanderers,
Lifted the bucket, doused himself
And charged.

See an East African lion
Nose tip to tail tuft ten, eleven feet
Slouching towards you
Swaying its head from side to side
Doubling its pace, its gold-black mane
That stretches down its belly to its groin
Catching the sunlight as it hits
Twice its own length a beat, then leaps
Great forepaws high great claws disclosed
The scarlet insides of its mouth
Parting a roar as loud as sail-sized flames
And lands, slam-scattering the herd.

'That is how Hector came on us.'

Despite the few who ran
Out from the rest to get at him and died
Or ducked and dodged his restless spear
And came away covered with blood and died,
Like shoppers trapped by a calamity
The rest pressed back onto the rest.
And he, partly to please his comet's tail,
Took sideways jumps--one foot up to the other in the air--
Chattering his spear along their front.

The ridge.

Sheepgrove (as asked).

Idomeneo does not wait.

Dustlight.  Far off
A woman with an infant on her back
Is picking fruit."

(Pages 16-21)

***

Holy Cow!  Can you believe this stuff?  Every time I read these lines I am simply gobsmacked, and I need to reach down and pick my jaw up off of the floor.  Logue forces you to recall your mythology--Zeus' "brainchild," Athena--the petulant, teenaged, ice-white faced Athena.  This is great stuff!  The description of Hector charging into battle was awesome and flat-out terrifying--the simile simply could not be better--equating Hector to a ferocious male African lion!  And the perspective of young Lutie, Hector's nephew and chariot driver, sort of overlays the entire scene.  The ending of this section of the poem is such a juxtaposition too, an almost jarring contrast from the shocking combat to this pastoral moment of a woman off in the distance up on the side-slope of the hill with her child on her back quietly picking fruit. In other words, even in the midst of all of this drama and pathos, life goes on.  Trust me, all three of these books of poetry are like this.  Your eyes are wide, wide open as you read each page, your brain is a sponge just taking in Logue's metaphors, his use of simile and allegory, and his just plain masterful use of language in turning phrase after phrase.

I also think it is important for me to add that I want you to know that I don't think that this is Homer modernized.  No, this is a version--an interpretation--of Homer squarely landed in the oral tradition from whence it came, and somehow I think that Homer, and all of those who've translated The Iliad over centuries, would thoroughly approve of what Christopher Logue has done (and is continuing to do) and embrace his work wholeheartedly.

I plan to share more from Christopher Logue's volumes of interpretations of the books of The Iliad in the coming days, and I also plan to compare and contrast his poetry with my upcoming evaluation of Stephen Mitchell's new translation of The Iliad that is being released on October 12, 2011 (see my posting here).  Stay tuned!