Selected Poems

by Christopher Logue

Christopher Logue escaped the drabness of post-war England for the freedoms and excitements of bohemian Paris, where he began to write poetry as a member of the expatriate community. This collection reflects his lyrical gifts, his outspokenness and his sense of artistic adventure.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 20, 1996

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.

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source: wikipedia.org

Reviews

[Liam Guilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most enjoyable collections of poetry I've read. I'd give it more than five stars if I could.

Logue's reputation as a 'major poet' rests securely on his version of Homer. 'War Music' is one of the best narrative poems of modern times. So turning from that to his shorter poems risks the disappointment of turning from A Dance to the Music of Time to Powell's shorter novels.

There is no disappointment. The shorter poems are excellent. And what's notable here is their range: a two-line squib, poster poems, declarative political pieces, song lyrics, conventional lyrics, personal invective, and impressive versions of Villion.

Logue has recorded his excitement on first reading Eliot. He knew Becket and there are collaborations with Becket's translator included here. There are sequences, New Numbers especially, which show he'd learnt from them, and then created something distinctly his own.

What holds the disparate pieces together, apart from the skill of the writing, is the presence of the poet in the background. 'Voice' is a much-overused term, usually meaningless, or meaning 'monotonic poems', but there is a genuine voice here. It's not a comfortable one. But it's intelligent and knows when to take itself seriously and when to dance.

The book contains short narratives which are interesting both as examples of his narrative art and in themselves. I think the most impressive is 'The Girls', although it shows Logue as master of the kind of 'poetic narrative' that doesn't quite narrate, leaving the reader with more questions than it answers: what happens to the girls at the end, who is the boy on the horse, why does he have a machine gun?

None of these unanswered questions detract from the poem. Part of the dazzle is the way different 'registers' can be held together and made into a coherrent whole. The last stanza of The Girls is particularly beautiful and a reminder that Logue may have mastered narrative, but part of that mastery was his ability to evoke scene and mood.

The book finishes with Logue's first stab at Homer.

There's an interview, possibly for the Paris Review, where the claim is made that War Music is the product of Logue's genius, the short poems of his talent.

I would dispute the distinction. If he'd never written War Music there's enough in here for him to stake a claim to being one of the more interesting poets of the 20th Century.

And if you haven't done so, you should read his memoir, Prince Charming. Not only is it an excellent example of 'a memoir’ but it provides insight into the writing of many of these poems.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Covering a period of time from the 40s to the 2000s, these poems have a remarkably consistent voice and worldview. Doubtful about humanity at large, yet committed to the worth of individuals, Logue skewers nationalism, opposes war, has a lot of fun and, in some bravura later poems achieves a variety of viewpoints that cohere into a panoramic view of what Logue has pieced together in his decades examining the human condition. I didn’t read the excerpt from his telling of the Iliad, War Music, because I plan to read it soon.
I'm so attracted by Logue's unpretentious but not artless voice and his wry humanism that I wish his individual collections were easy to acquire.

[Milo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have read this collection too slowly and too intermittently to remember the way in which the first pages relate to the last. I briefly skimmed over prior to keyboarding, and found that I generally prefer the later poems to the earlier poems. They seem to dance about in form; and yet often seem more true, and less construed, than the earlier pieces. There is a low-hum domestic absurdity to Logue that I very much appreciate. It comes through even in War Music – there is something so base and familiar he discovers even in Homeric epic. When he talks about love, or newspaper headlines, or cats and mice. Here he seems to understand all the sinews and lines and intersecting polygons. Some of the longer poems can, essentially, go off on one – as if often the case it is in small fragments that Logue is most beautiful, and most incisive. Even the evening light, that we call sentiment, seems to creep in through diagonal passageways and old-man musing.

[zunggg · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a fair bit of chaff in this retrospective, but when Logue's on song he's a match for any English poet of the second half of the 20th century. Stuff like "When I was serving my country" and "Caption for a Photograph of Four Organized Criminals" blends the personal and political as deftly as his contemporaries Gavin Ewart (of whom Logue reminds me) and Peter Reading, and his later work — "Fragment" and "New Numbers" especially — reads like an updating of Eliot with its easy but insistent iambs and many-angled narrative voice. There's a very funny invective against a neighbour who mutilates Logue's tree. There's an extract from his monumental "War Music" included too, but you should read that in its entirety. I loved this one (could you call it an ecLogue?):

Things

The sun shines on the fields and on the town.
Far in the distance by the mill
A man in blue is gardening.
A cat sleeps on a window-sill.
At a bar, two gentlemen discuss the latest Aston-Martin.

A boy and girl by a railway bridge.
The girl holds up her face. Is kissed.
The train that passes by contains
A general and a scientist
Delighting in each other's brains.

In a quiet place a woman of fifty dressed in black,
With a newspaper across her face,
Dreams that she is young and slim.
The front page of the paper says:
  I MARRIED A SEXUAL MANIAC
And the back page says:
  SKIRTS WILL BE SHORTER IN THE SPRING.

The lovers go their separate ways.
She feels he only wants one thing.
He feels he's misunderstood.
The man who has been gardening
Cleans his spade with a bit of wood.
And the sun goes down on the fields and on the town.

[Russio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Urbanal starts well. The Somg of the Imperial Carrion is OK. The Iliad segment is fine. The rest is drivel - the worst kind of 50s/60s free love rubbish that was an excuse for the getting over of legs. Outdated, not very skilful and a bit grubby. Also confused - a pacifist who signs up for the services. Yet the confidence of the voice fails to depict these uncertainties, making the whole thing seem insincere and glib. Like a humourless Mersey Sound poet.

[Steve Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some absolute crackers in here: well worth a read

[David Lai · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ho hum.