Reputations of the Tongue: On Poets and Poetry

Technically skillful, well-traveled and impressively knowledgeable, Logan (Vain Empires) couples a welcome faculty for observation with a narrow range of sour emotions in his fifth book of poems, many of which invoke earlier poets Logan admires. In sonnets, tercets, ballad-stanzas, blank verse, even in blues (""Blues for Penelope""), Logan draws heavily on Robert Lowell and on Elizabeth Bishop to find verbal equivalents for resentment and disappointment. ""Reading the Greek Gospels"" glowers in the wrathful tones of the early Lowell: ""Raw Christians call the parish to account/ for bearish interest in the judgement day... The neighbor cats walk snarling through the mire."" The later Lowell's aphoristic tendencies pervade several travel poems focused on personal and political disillusion and decline, from short work set in England and Florida (where Logan teaches) to the concluding sequence, ""The Fall of Byzantium."" Logan's attempts at Bishop's revelatory similes falter after his heavy-handed endings: English landscape, seen from the air, divulges an unsurprising truth--""We never escape very far/ from the deaths that await us below."" Elegies to Bishop and to Amy Clampitt imitate those poets' styles more directly, while Logan's sonnets about famous people and places owe much to late-1930s Auden: ""The maps were old; the X had been erased/ that marked the valley of their chosen fate."" Logan does best in his well-crafted ballad stanzas, whose chief precedents (Bishop and Derek Walcott) don't prevent him from finding original music. ""Small Bad Town"" discovers the perfect words for an endless disconsolate suburb, still stuck in the 1950s: ""The fractional white moons/ of the satellite dishes/ bother the broken noons/ and the mortal wishes// of the local housewife/ burning from her soaps./ Time sends invitations/ in little envelopes."" (Oct.) FYI: Also in October, the UP of Florida will publish Reputations of the Tongue: On Poets and Poetry, a collection of Logan's essays and reviews. ($34.95 288p ISBN 0-8130-1697-5)