Night Battle: Poems

by William Logan

Breathtakingly intense poems about language, love, and the loss of purity in the world

Logan'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 stranger
might feel such cruel beauty monotonous.
But, inshore, a crusty alligator steams,
nosing into reeds to let off passengers
or take on canvas sacks of mail,
as if the weather had never once been tender
or required, like love, a moment of surrender.
--from "Florida in January"

* Logan's last collection, Vain Empires , was a New York Times Notable Book

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

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

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Logan's is like an American Geoffrey Hill, as craggy and cranky and with seemingly similar religious commitments, although Hill has more redemption in his verses than Logan. Logan's deep love of formalism and his conservative criticism deeply inform the verse. Yet Logan has a beauty and precision that is hard to deny despite the cheerlessness and hyper-criticism. I enjoyed these despite myself and the poems seeming airlessness.

[KenziTheRagin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh. It was modern poetry. It didn't really blow my skirt up.

[Margaryta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Night Battle: Poems (Penguin Poets) What an unusual and wonderful poetry collection. What didn't appeal to many other readers sure found a way to make a home in me. I don't think I've come across any collection of poems that captures the exotic feeling of traveling, history, and human emotion in such a perfect way. If you want to get a feel of just what the poems are like, I'd suggest "Niobe" and "Spice Bazaar", my two favourites from this collection which, although rather different from each other, both managed to portray the mastery which Logan has with his words and the images he crafts with them. This collection took me on a journey to faraway places that are physically reachable, as well as the farther corners of the emotional spectrum I haven't visited in a while, and it did it all so wonderfully, an eloquent tour guide that may get tongue tied at times yet never fails to amaze when the moment is right.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

About this poet it is possible to say, "Yes, he's very good, but I'm so glad I didn't, couldn't, write these poems." Most of his poems are like black holes, sucking in everything, giving back nothing. Particularly light. A surfeit of technique fails to hide a pure absence of compassion. One pure thing.