Strange Flesh

Long known for his frequently blistering, sometimes brilliantly written, book reviews, Logan also merits attention for his verse: his shapely, often rhymed stanzas and unrhymed sonnets are crisp, well observed, frequently angry, propelled by his sense of the past. “At eleven, I wanted to own/ the corroded, omnipotent gods,” he says of the statues he saw as a child in church; in a tour de force quartet of sonnets on paintings and photographs, “The mists leak cream, clouds filthier than cream,/ dragged like an afterthought from the sky's lead bowl.” Logan's range of subjects is larger, his voice more assured, than in other recent volumes. Poems about travels in England and the Netherlands speak fruitfully to the quieter poems on the same subjects published by Logan's partner, Debra Greger. (There is even a finely tuned love poem to her.) Logan may at times sound more like Robert Lowell than like himself, but he often sounds wonderful, poem by poem—and he brings, at his best, a sense of human life, of answers ignored and potential squandered. Logan's acrid wisdom offers a sense that he has seen through the facades we perversely maintain: “Things went back to normal,” one poem ends, “or the normal that children have to call normal.” (Oct.)