Deception Island: Selected Early Poems, 1974-1999

by William Logan

William Logan's poetry has been called elegant, difficult, cranky, formidable, dazzling, intoxicating, and ominous. For almost forty years, he has published poems that do not fit comfortably with the work of most of his contemporaries, and perhaps do not want to fit at all. "Deception Island," a selection from his first five books, is an introduction to the work of a poet who has taken a resistant pleasure in the Byzantine contrivance of Venice, in the empty vision of the American west, and in the romantic longing of British landscape.

148 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2011

About the author

William Logan is Alumni/ae Professor at the University of Florida. He is the author of seven books of criticism, most recently Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past (Columbia, 2018), and eleven books of poetry. Logan has won the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, the Allen Tate Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

Reviews

[Ted Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reputed to be difficult to read, this poetry is but it is loaded with (I use this term gingerly) genius. He is a subtle, ironic, and insightful poet. I am thrilled to be reading his work. This is top flight poetry. I is highly recommend this short compound. This is superb work.