The Whispering Gallery

August 15, 2005
Known for his expertly witty reviews as well as for his technically accomplished verse, Logan (Vain Empires
) considers landscapes, recollections and historical events from Britain, Italy, New England and the American South in this thoughtful if sometimes derivative seventh collection. Failed Florida real estate ventures receive their just deserts in inventive identical rhyme ("lot" rhymes with the biblical "Lot," "like regret" with "every egret"); prairie dwellers find themselves "condemned to Paradise," and visitors in Venice "breathe the dust of a past we soon become." In quatrains, in nonce forms and in "Penitence"—a set of 26 linked poems (each one 19 lines of blank verse)—Logan conveys often bitter, but always intelligent, observations about collapsing marriages, disappointed travelers and the fate of the Western world. He does so, however, by hewing close to his models. The disjointed aphorisms of "Penitence" sound very much like Robert Lowell's late sonnets, the landscape poetry like the earlier Lowell. The rhyming poems have learned much, perhaps too much, from Derek Walcott. Nevertheless, Logan's one-liners demand to be quoted ("The sick know justice as a troubled dream"; "we live in an age of reasons, never reason") and his bracingly critical temperament and sharp technique easily suffice.

November 1, 2005
Noted as both a poet (his six works of poetry include, most recently, "Macbeth in Venice") and a critic ("Reputations of the Tongue "was a National Book Critics Circle finalist), Logan here charts a steamy terrain of diminished expectations, moving from Southern swamp to suburb, from a Massachusetts seascape to archaic England. Along the way, he injects the decayed American landscape with a dry wit: - -Welcome to Paradise, ' said the sign, / but the exit had flaked away. - His world encompasses the isolations of middle age, bereft of children, where women sometimes appear to be members of an endangered species and don't stay long. In -To a Mirror, - Logan's invented form embodies its subject - -The words I would evade in you/ are lost in Everglades of you - -with each couplet rhyming internally and each line of each quatrain ending identically in -you. - But clever prosody lies at the edge of Logan's talent. Instead, we have -Penitence, - a dense, historical sequence of 26 poems that showcases his muscular line and love of thick atmosphere. Thus, off old coins, he writes: -The farms/ still harrow their buttons of rust-soaked by nighthawks/ in a jar of vinegar, out pour pocked visages/ of a late Caesar. - The result is always engaging. Recommended." -E.M. Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York"

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.