All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten

by Christopher Logue

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

"Kill! Kill for me!
Better to die than live without killing!"

Who says prayer does no good?

Christopher Logue's work in progress, his Iliad, has been called "the best translation of Homer since Pope's" ( The New York Review of Books ). Here in All Day Permanent Red is doomed Hector, the lion, "slam-scattering the herd" at the height of his powers. Here is the Greek army rising with a sound like a "sky-wide Venetian blind." Here is an arrow's tunnel, "the width of a lipstick," through a neck. Like Homer himself, Logue is quick to mix the ancient and the new, because his Troy exists outside time, and no translator has a more Homeric interest in the truth of battle, or in the absurdity and sublimity of war.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Mythology, Literature, Fiction, War, British Literature

51 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Christopher Logue, CBE was an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival. He also wrote for the theatre and cinema as well as acting in a number of films. His two screenplays are Savage Messiah and The End of Arthur's Marriage. He was also a long-term contributor to Private Eye magazine, as well as writing for the Merlin literary journal of Alexander Trocchi. He won the 2005 Whitbread Poetry Award for Cold Calls.

His early popularity was marked by the release of a loose adaptation of Pablo Neruda's "Twenty Love Poems", later released as an extended play recording, "Red Bird: Jazz and Poetry", backed by a Jazz group led by Tony Kinsey.

One of his poems, "Be Not Too Hard" was set to music by Donovan Leach, and made popular by Joan Baez, from her 1967 album "Joan". Donovan's version appeared in the film "Poor Cow"(1967).

His major poetical work was an ongoing project to render Homer's Iliad into a modernist idiom. This work is published in a number of small books, usually equating to two or three books of the original text. (The volume entitled Homer: War Music was shortlisted for the 2002 International Griffin Poetry Prize.) He also published an autobiography called Prince Charming (1999).

His lines tend to be short, pithy and frequently political, as in Song of Autobiography:

"I, Christopher Logue, was baptized the year
Many thousands of Englishmen
Fists clenched, their bellies empty,
Walked day and night on the capital city."

He wrote the couplet that is sung at the beginning and end of the 1965 film A High Wind in Jamaica, the screenplay for Savage Messiah (1972), a television version of Antigone (1962), and a short play for the TV series The Wednesday Play titled The End of Arthur's Marriage (1965).

He also appeared in a number of films as an actor, most notably as Cardinal Richelieu in Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils and as the spaghetti-eating fanatic in Terry Gilliam's 1977 film Jabberwocky.

Logue wrote for the Olympia Press under the pseudonym, Count Palmiro Vicarion, including a pornographic novel, Lust.

________________________________________

source: wikipedia.org

Reviews

[Captain Sir Roddy, R.N. (Ret.) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Update--December 12, 2011--

I have just learned that Christopher Logue died on December 2, 2011, at his home in London. I will miss his voice...

***

Fifty-one pages! Fifty-one pages of pure cinematic poetic perfection!

Okay, here's my challenge--

Take Homer's Books 4 and 5 of The Iliad, boil the plot down to the simple essence of Man's humanity as well as brutality to his fellow Man, add a dose of Honor and Integrity, and then throw in the gods and goddesses who want to be mortal, but can't be (and it really pisses them off, I think). Now repackage this in the oral tradition from whence The Iliad came nearly three-thousand years ago. Don't modernize it or "make it contemporary for our time"--but make it pulsate with life, with horror, with humor, make it 'thrum' with drama, make it drip with pathos, and evoke empathy; but most of all, make it scream to be read aloud on a street corner or the train on your commute home. Make it something so viscerally compelling and terrifyingly sublime that the Coen brothers sleep with it under their pillow at night and try and figure out ways to have Akira Kurosawa rise from the 'long sleep' and help write the screenplay and set up camera-shots with them.

This is what British poet Christopher Logue has exquisitely accomplished with his slim little volume, All Day Permanent Red.

The subtitle of the book is The First Battle Scene's of Homer's Iliad Rewritten, and boy are they ever! This is relentless stuff that grabs you by the throat in its large, hairy, grasping paw and squeezes tightly until your airway is nearly clamped shut and your eyes start bulging. Toward this end, Logue clearly understands the meaning of the ancient Greek term of androktasia--the vignette describing battle killings. If you've read The Iliad you know precisely what I'm referring to, for example--

"Antilokhos was the first man to down a Trojan soldier,
a brave man in the front line, Ekhepolos
Thalysiades: he hit him on the ridge
that bore his crest, and driven in, the point
went through his forehelm and his forehead bone,
and darkness veiled his eyes..."

(The Iliad, Book Four, Lines 551-556, Robert Fitzgerald translation, 1974)

That is an example of a traditional use of androktasia in Homer. Now let me share Logue's vision and his use of androktasia in the poem--

"To the sigh of the string, see Pandar's shot float off;
To the slap of the string on the stave, float on
Over the strip for a beat, a beat; and then
Carry a tunnel the width of a lipstick through Quist's neck."

Holy Crap! It is visual, it is palpably aural too. One hears the arrow leave the bowstring, and then watches it arc and soar over the field, and with growing horror you see it strike the poor fellow (aforementioned, Quist), but the brilliance of this is in the last line with Logue's use of the simple word "lipstick"--this one word not only tells you size of the wound, but it evokes the color RED.

And it just gets better and better. How about this terrifying description of the great Trojan Prince and warrior, Hector, as he charges into battle against a small group of Greek soldiers--

"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.'"

Hector as a huge and ferocious male lion; "slam-scattering the herd" as he charges into battle. I gotta tell you that when I read that description for the first time, I damn near dropped the book, I was gobsmacked, completely and utterly gobsmacked! You just don't encounter poetry that lives and breathes like this every day. You have to read this, you just have to! But--yes, there's a 'but'--you do have to make sure that you have your one prerequisite under your belt. In my opinion, you should have read Homer's The Iliad first. Then, and only then, are you fully empowered to step into this crazy dream that Logue has created.

Christopher Logue began working on his vision and interpretation of Homer in the 1950s, and slowly but surely he has let bits of it out for us to experience. I have three volumes of his Iliad, and they are not only stunningly amazing, but they just feel Homeric. If you're interested in collecting all of Logue's rewritten Iliad these are the titles to look for--

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

I have read the first half of the first book, War Music, after I re-read Books 1-4 of Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Iliad. I did the same thing with All Day Permanent Red as I finished Books 5-6. Logue's Cold Calls generally covers Books 5-9. The last half of War Music is Logue's interpretation of the Death of Patroclus and Achilles' re-entry into the fray with all its attendant tragic results, i.e., Books 16-19.

So, if you're ready for some awesomely outrageously cool poetry, get these volumes. Take 'em home, and get ready. By "get ready" I mean put on a good Kevlar flak vest; because you're gonna need it. Logue will hammer you with repeated body blows that will leave you bruised, battered, and on the floor gasping for air. You'll also come away better understanding that war sucks and that nobody wins, but that Life does go on, and that good men can and do rise to the occasion and do the right thing. According to the legend, the Trojan War lasted ten years. Christopher Logue has significantly contributed to the written record of the legend with the weaving of his own poetic 'Bayeux Tapestry,' a rich and terrible tableau that tells the story of the last year of arguably the most prominent war in Human history.

When you're done reading this, walk over to your bookshelf and slide it in right next to your copy of The Iliad, for that is where Logue's works belong--they are companions, they are Brothers in Arms--and somehow I think Homer would completely concur.

[Laura Leaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished re-reading this poem (it is not a translation).

It's like a spear through the eye.

Logue mixes the original images of Homer's Iliad with modern language and brings the war to vivid life in such a way that you can hear the marching of feet and the twanging of "Oriental bow[s:]," and see, taste, and feel everything else.

Here is a sample:

The armies hum
As power-station outflow cables do.
The Trojan's edge.
The light goes upright through the sky.
Downslope,
Child Diomed to those who follow him:

"Still."
"Still."

Read this after "The Iliad" and be struck anew with the beauty language can make of violence.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mad Max meets the Classics. There's a lot to like about a modern retelling of the Iliad that has Greeks with "Rommel" tans (War Music), and gods, such as Athena ("Holy Girl") sitting down to eat her nectarine jelly. Actually, this is the second time I've read this (I got it when it first came out). I had seen on Goodreads so many high ratings regarding Logue's effort, that I thought I'd give this installment another try. This installment is only 50 pages long (with lots of white space), most of which is battle poetry (charge, thrust, stab, chop, shout, etc). The last few pages (which are magnificent), tie this portion up in such a way as to justify, I suppose, its release. Still, it's a slender piece of Logue's overall effort. I hope he completes the entire Iliad, so that the reader can place such snippets like All Day Permanent Red into the overall context of the poem. (I'm giving a half star for the cool cover art.)

[Kirsti · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Host must fight host, / And to amuse the Lord our God / Man slaughter man."

Gorgeous retelling of part of the Iliad. Logue throws in modern references, including power stations, Uzis, and bubblegum. In fact, the title is the name of a shade of lipstick. But it doesn't seem disrespectful because it's all so vivid and imaginative.

I became interested in Logue after reading his obituary, which is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/art...


Christopher Logue Dies at 85; Modernized the ‘Iliad’
By MARGALIT FOX
Christopher Logue, an English poet acclaimed for his multivolume modernization of the “Iliad” — a literary endeavor noteworthy for lasting four times as long as the Trojan War itself; even more noteworthy for its use of evocative anachronisms like Uzis, helicopters and aircraft carriers to conjure the world of Homer’s Bronze Age warriors; and still more noteworthy for having been accomplished without his knowing a word of Greek — died on Dec. 2 at his home in London.

His death was announced by his publisher, Faber & Faber. Mr. Logue, whose life was a fittingly picaresque epic that also included being imprisoned in a Crusader castle, writing a pornographic novel, acting in films by the director Ken Russell and committing a modest armed robbery at the age of 8, was 85.

Though he wrote more than two dozen well-received volumes of original Modernist poetry, Mr. Logue remained best known for his English-language “Iliad,” a project on which he embarked in 1959 and worked in intense fits and starts for more than 40 years.

He would come nowhere near to reworking the 24 books and more than 15,000 lines of Homer’s epic, for, as the British newspaper The Independent pointed out in 1991, Mr. Logue “has accounted for one line every three days on average; at this rate he should be through by about 2080.”

The sections of the “Iliad” he did complete were published as “War Music” (1981), which reworked Books 16 to 19; “Kings” (1991; Books 1 and 2); “The Husbands” (1995; Books 3 and 4); “All Day Permanent Red” (2003), which centers on the poem’s first battle scenes and whose title Mr. Logue took from an advertisement for lipstick; and “Cold Calls” (2005), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award, which continues the battle.

Mr. Logue, who used earlier English translations as points of departure and consulted frequently with scholars of Homeric Greek, took pains to stress that his “Iliad” was not a translation but an adaptation.

Wanting it to stand or fall on its merits as English poetry, he reordered and invented scenes, created occasional new characters and modernized language and imagery: his text includes references to Shakespeare, Venetian blinds and World War II. In “Kings,” he writes:

Nine days of this,

And on the tenth, Ajax,

Grim underneath his tan as Rommel after ‘Alamein,

Summoned the army to the common sand. ...

Not surprisingly, Mr. Logue’s Homer loosed the wrath of scholastic purists and some critics. But it was overwhelmingly lauded — even by classicists — for the combined power of its luminous language, cinematic imagery and hurtling pace. These things, reviewers said, lent his account of the decade-long conflict between Greece and Troy in the 12th century B.C. a force heard in few other English versions.

As a result, Mr. Logue’s “Iliad” seemed to capture truly the swift-footed immediacy of the original, which was composed and transmitted by generations of oral bards starting in the ninth or eighth century B.C.

Named a Commander of the British Empire in 2007, Mr. Logue had been described by The Independent two years earlier as “the greatest war poet in England.”

Here he is, in “All Day Permanent Red,” showing Greek troops rising for battle:

Think of a raked sky-wide Venetian blind.

Add the receding traction of its slats

Of its slats of its slats as a hand draws it up.

Hear the Greek army getting to its feet.

Then of a stadium when many boards are raised

And many faces change to one vast face.

So, where there were so many masks,

Now one Greek mask glittered from strip to ridge.

By his own account, John Christopher Logue was born a rogue — in Portsmouth, on England’s south coast, in November 1926.

His father, a postal clerk, and his mother, a homemaker, were inclined to indulge his youthful high spirits, as when, at 8, he trained a pistol on a girl in the street and made off with her ice cream. That it was a toy pistol was at least partly mitigating.

The young Mr. Logue, whose formal education ended when he was 17, served with the British Army during World War II.

While stationed in Palestine, he helped himself to six blank Army pay books — official documents used to record a soldier’s pay and establish his identity. After boasting idly that he planned to sell them, he was court-martialed and served about a year and a half in Acre Central Prison, a 12th-century fortress built by Crusaders in western Galilee.

“It wasn’t so different from being at boarding school,” Mr. Logue told the newspaper The Scotsman in 1996. “In other words, it was bloody awful. It was during that time, though, that I got properly interested in poetry. So it was quite useful in the end.”

In London in the 1950s, Mr. Logue resorted to a time-honored refuge of impecunious writers by composing a pornographic novel, “Lust.” Written under the name Count Palmiro Vicarion, it was published in Paris in 1959 by Maurice Girodias, whose other titles included Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.”

He wrote the screenplay for Mr. Russell’s “Savage Messiah,” a film about the life of the French primitive sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, which Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, called one of the 10 worst movies of 1972. (Mr. Russell died last month at 84.)

Mr. Logue had on-screen roles in Mr. Russell’s television movie “Dante’s Inferno” (1967) and his feature film “The Devils” (1971) , in which he played Cardinal Richelieu. His other acting credits include small parts in “Jabberwocky” (1977), directed by Terry Gilliam, and “The Affair of the Necklace” (2001), starring Hilary Swank.

Mr. Logue’s survivors include his wife, Rosemary Hill, who is a historian and biographer.

His other work includes children’s picture books; a memoir, “Prince Charming” (1999); and “Selected Poems” (1996).

In 1959, Mr. Logue, already an established poet, was asked by the BBC to adapt a section of the “Iliad” for broadcast; his lack of Greek did not deter them. Four decades later, he found himself still embedded with Ajax, Achilles and their lot.

Long active in progressive politics, Mr. Logue was an original signatory of the Committee of 100, the British antiwar group founded in 1960 by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and others.

He often said he considered his sanguinary, loud-thundering retelling of the “Iliad” to be his deepest antiwar statement of all.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 18, 2011


An obituary last Sunday about the poet Christopher Logue misstated, in some editions, the year that his “Selected Poems” was published. It was 1996, not 1997.

[Marc Nash · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good lines, mainly where mixing the ancient (armies with spears, swords and shields) with the modern, but I couldn't really see the point of the exercise as a whole. Maybe it needs to be performed, like a modern-day version of the ancient bards

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJE-L...

[Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

🛡️DOING A RE-READ STARTING MARCH 3, 2023 🛡️AND DONE🛡️


Pages 50-51
☀️ Then up, over her cyclorama peaks
Whose snow became before the fire before the wheel, the Rhine,
Below whose estuaries beneath an endless sky,
Sand bars and sabre grass, salt flats and travelling dunes
Lead west, until, green in their shallow sea
That falls away into the Atlantic deeps

☀️ He sees the Islands of the West.
He who? Why, God, of course.
Who sighs before He looks
Back to the ridge that is, save for a million footprints,
Empty now.

Page 49
☀️Sparks from the bronze. Lit splinters from the poles.
"I am hit.”
"Take my arm."
"I am dying.”
"Shake my hand.”
"Do not go."
"Goodbye little fellow with the gloomy face."
As Greece, as Troy, fought on and on.

☀️Or are they only asleep?
They are too tired to sleep.
The tears are falling from their eyes.
The noise they make while fighting is so loud
That what you see is like a silent film.
And as the dust converges over them
The ridge is as it is when darkness falls.

Page 38
☀️ Slip into the fighting.
Into a low-sky site crammed with huge men,
Half-naked men, brave, loyal, fit, slab-sided men,
Men who came face to face with gods, who spoke with gods,
Leaping onto each other like wolves
Screaming, kicking, slicing, hacking, ripping
Thumping their chests:
"I am full of the god!"

Page 31
☀️ Host must fight host,
And to amuse the Lord our God
Man slaughter man.

Page 28
☀️That Deckalin (who saw himself--once home-Beneath a tree, a drink in hand, describing Troy
Its wonders and its wealth) took on his noseguard's bridge.
Well manufactured as the helmet was
The spearpoint penetrated Deckalin's skull
And spurts of blood and bits of brain
Came through its tortoise holes.

Page 20
☀️ 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."

Page 17
“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?

Page 9
☀️ And now, as Hector moves through the light, downwards along the counter slope, his shield - whose rim’s ceramic fold will shatter bronze, whose 16 alternating gold and silver radiants burst from an adamant medusa-Aphrodité boss (Its hair bouffant with venomous eels, the pupils of its bullet-starred-glass eyes catching the sun) - catching the sun …. ☀️



🔥⚔️ ☀️ Brilliantly conceived and brilliantly written. I like Homer in all kinds of formats, but this translation absolutely brings the Greek and the story to full on, vibrant, fierce, awe full life. Highly recommended ….. especially if you’ve never read Homer or The Iliad. Moves like fire ☀️⚔️🔥

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

On and on on my Homer trek.
Logue (passed 2011) made a bit of a late career out of his reworkings of Homer's "The Iliad". He did 5 volumes of them, and covered a number (more than 5) of the epic's Books.
These are not translations, but rather scenes and books "rewritten", as he puts it.
He adds modern touches. Some work (the power station cables), some do not (the Uzi).
He also uses the repetition of the epic - Trojans often have their "coffin topped" shields included whenever they are mentioned. And the brutality of war is kept from the original.
I believe these were meant for live stage performances as well, and I imagine they worked quite well.
Free verse, at times the lines become a bit muddled, but that also is done to reflect the chaos on the battle field. And, Logue does quite well in presenting battle strategy, and troup placement and movement.
I have his other volumes, and I am looking forward to reading them as well. A worthy retelling of Homer in the 21st C.
Less than 50 ppp of text, the poem can be read in an evening. And makes for a great, quick reread - to pick up some of the detail and flow that a reader might miss in the first go through. There is a page of Notes at the back, which references his use of modern sources within his version.

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first discovered Christopher Logue in the late 1980s with one of his titles in an ambitious series to render The Iliad into modernist verse. Back then, as a self-confessed traditionalist I was skeptical but two pages into War Music I was a blathering convert. Logues's genius is synthesizing the action to it's most basic and there is no better artist at conveying the brutality and even more the mood of the Trojan War. With simple sentences Logue captures a page, captures a reader and frog-marches them toward his conclusion. The first book is War Music (subtitled "an Account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer's Iliad"). This was followed by Kings: An Account of Books 1 and 2 of Homer's Iliad and the present volume, All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten..

To appreciate Logue is to appreciate his succinct lines and his radical comparatives. Here is an example:

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 Idomenen from the ridge."

He prays.

"Brainchild Athena, Holy Girl,
As one you made
As calm and cool as water in a well.
1 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?

This quote also highlights the presence of the gods and the immediate role they play. Logue is inspired in how he compares an action to something else, something often completely unrelated to an ancient text. Some examples:

As many arrows on his posy shield /As microphones on politicians' stands:

Who gave a farm the size of Texas for Cassandra

Hapless as plane-crash bodies tossed ashore /Still belted in their seats

His Porsche-fine chariot with Meep on reins

That these modern touches work is evident when seen in the context of a larger section, as with this astonishing rendering:

Drop into it.Noise so clamorous it sucks.
You rush your pressed-flower hackles out
To the perimeter.
And here it comes:
That unpremeditated joy as you
-The Uzi shuddering warm against your hip
Happy in danger in a dangerous place
Yourself another self found at Troy-
Squeeze nickel through that rush of Greekoid scum!
Oh wonderful, most wonderful, and then again more wonderful
A bond no word or lack of words can break,
Love above love!
And here they come again the noble Greeks,
Ido, a spear in one a banner in his other hand
Your life at every instant up for - 
Gone.
And, candidly, who gives a toss?
Your heart beats strong. Your spirit grips.
King Richard calling for another horse (his fifth).
King Marshal Ney shattering his sabre on a cannon ball.
King Ivan Kursk, 22.30 hrs,
July 4th to 14th '43, 7000 tanks engaged,
". . . he clambered up and pushed a stable-bolt
Into that Tiger-tank's red-hot-machine-gun's mouth
And bent the bastard up. Woweee!"
Where would we be if he had lost?
Achilles? Let him sulk.

In essence this is cinematic poetry. Elemental but with a reality about it that I have never experienced before. I was happy to see while preparing this review that there is one last Logue Iliad (he died in 2011), Cold Calls: War Music Continued, Volume 1.

Note: I cannot quite figure out how to render the format of the quotes properly in GoodReads. The indentations on various lines get stripped out.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fucking great.

Anyone familiar with Logue's War Music will know more or less what you're in for with this one. For those of you who aren't, Christopher Logue (1926 - 2011) was a British poet best known for his radical recasting of Homer's Iliad. He started with Patroclus's aristeia and death, and its aftermath (Books 16-19), then went back to the beginning with "Kings" (Books 1-2) and "Husbands" (Books 3-4). Those are all collected in War Music. All Day Permanent Red deals with Books 5 and 6.

Logue got his title for this volume from a lipstick ad. (Indeed, in the early pages we see an arrow "carry a tunnel the width of a lipstick" through a man's neck.) One section of War Music was called "GBH" — shorthand, in British legal jargon, for "grievous bodily harm." So anyway, one thing this book is not is a translation. What it is is awesome.

I'll quote a couple of standout passages, to give you the idea.

     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 live without killing!"

     Who says prayer does no good?

Another, to illustrate Logue's much-commented-on anachronisms, which follow very much in the spirit of Homer, who described bronze-age warfare in iron-age terminology:

     Drop into it.
Noise so clamorous it sucks.
You rush your pressed-flower hackles out
To the perimeter.
     And here it comes:
That unpremeditated joy as you
— the Uzi shuddering warm against your hip
Happy in danger in a dangerous place
Yourself another self you found at Troy —
Squeeze nickel through that rush of Greekoid scum!
Oh wonderful, most wonderful, and then again more wonderful
A bond no word or lack of words can break,
Love above love!

I love the drive and the calibrated energy of Logue's lines — the way they range out from, and then are drawn back to, the English pentameter, like a falcon on a tether.

I am looking forward to reading Logue's next (and, apparently, last) installment, Cold Calls, which was never published in the US, but which was printed — in its entirety, I'm pretty sure — in Poetry Magazine back in 2004, in an issue that I still have on my shelves.

The energy, vitality, and intelligence in this poetry are intoxicating. It is bloody well done.

[Max Renn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Iliad re-imagined as a photo shoot for Vogue by Helmut Newton... and i mean this in the best possible way.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Blurred bronze. Blood? Blood like a car-wash: / 'But it keeps the dust down.'"

[Panio Gianopoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

My dad has been a Logue fan for years and somehow I had stockpiled some of his books and never gotten to them. So good. Sassy and sarcastic and invigorating and fun. Thumbs up.

I realize that everyone's all currently hot and bothered by all the new Homer (and others) translations coming out, particularly those by women, but I'd like to see more of this translate-rewrite-imitate-modernate style stuff instead. (Hint: It's BETTER.)

[Hall's Bookshop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Logue's "account" of the Iliad is a masterpiece, and, if you manage to listen to a recording of it, it will become impossible to disentangle Logue's brilliant declamation from the poetry on the page. I find myself coming back to War Music as a whole over and over again after long intervals - just mesmerizing.

*Edited.

[kayla goggin · Rating 3 out of 5]

idk if i really "get" this but it does have some very pretty lines:

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 live without killing!"

Who says prayer does no good?

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moment-by-moment, there were several areas where the fluidity (read: couldn't tell what was happening) in comprehension of a scene felt unappreciated--but by the end, with the full scope, it was worth it.

[buffy · Rating 4 out of 5]

THINK OF A RAKED SKY-HIGH VENETIAN BLIND

i read in colors & textures & sounds & this book helped me out so much I'm screaming

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Believe the blurbs: it is really that good.

[Naomi Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Logue's poetic re-tellings of Homer's the Iliad are so vivid and emotional. I'm blown away every time.

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

The way this poet describes the deaths is poetic and gruesome in equal parts.

[Cosmo Hinsman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it twice now. I think I’ll read it a thousand more times. It’s like watching the Matrix for the first time, or walking through an empty cathedral. Enormous. The stuff of memory.

[Dr. Carl Ludwig Dorsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Logue evidently died in December of 2011; perhaps there is more of this work yet to be published. I would be happy to see more, but would be happier to see it, and his already published Iliad work, in an extensively annotated form, binding it back to the existing texts, translations, and other Logue sources.

The work is remarkable as it stands, but it can hardly be argued that it stands entirely alone. I believe annotation would honor and envalue both Logue’s appropriation and his originality.

[Simultaneous note for All Day Permanent Red and War Music by Christopher Logue.]

[Nicola Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetic bricolage brimming with energy. With cinematic jump cuts and scene notes, Logue reimagines the first battle of the Iliad, renaming familiar characters and gleefully mixing imagery that's historically accurate and wildly anachronistic (arrows carve tunnels through people's necks the width of a lipstick, Idomeneo would 'sign a five-war-contract on the nod'). As I read I felt dust gritting under my palms and blood in my mouth. An experience as startling as a flick in the eye.Christopher Logue

[Sanj · Rating 4 out of 5]

At less than 40 pages, this is so short that you could miss it. Still it has moments, and is insane - but in that nice way.

Although this book is about "The First Battle Scenes...", I would still recommend starting with "War Music". It is a bit heftier, and allows for more time to adapt to Logue's manner of telling the story. Also, "War Music" was written first.

The chronology of publication is:
War Music
All Day Permanent Red
Cold Calls

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of Homer's Iliad translated by Christopher Logue. Enjoyed War Music more, but only because I like those scenes more. (Logue is translating the whole Iliad, but in chunks and publishing them piece by piece. I think three large chunks are currently published; I have read this one and War Music).

[Rob Weedon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. Read it in a sitting. Full of memorable moments and images, "have a nice day" says Hector as he decapitates a Greek; or the sound of the greek army standing up being compared to the rattle of a venetian blind. I read a borrowed copy some time ago but having written this I know I will need to get my own to re-read. Dang!

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended by Nomi, I checked this out of the library and loved it. I need to honestly read The Iliad and The Odyssey this summer. i feel shamed by you Classics and Archaeology friends in my life. I love myths and I love epic poetry. This kickstarts my interest again!

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

See War Music

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best title for a poetry book. Ever. (My first painting will be "The Accuser" comes in second.)

[Ann Klefstad · Rating 5 out of 5]

again, best metaphors I've ever read. The one of the rise of the Greeks as a opening venetian blind is so brilliant I have to reread it every month or so.