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William Logan's poetry has been called elegant, difficult, cranky, formidable, dazzling, intoxicating, and ominous. For almost forty years, he has published poems that do not fit comfortably with the work of most of his contemporaries, and perhaps do not want to fit at all. "Deception Island", a selection from his first five books, is an introduction to the work of a poet who has taken a resistant pleasure in the Byzantine contrivance of Venice, in the empty vision of the American west, and in the romantic longing of British landscape.
List of contents
- Contents
- from Sad-faced Men
- Deception Island
- The Object
- Observing Whales through Binoculars
- Seventy-Six
- Two Lives
- Travel Report
- Ice
- The Man on the Bed
- The Mantis
- A Portrait by Bellocq
- Tatiana Kalatschova
- The Lizard in His Medium
- from Difficulty
- Clare and Silence
- Arcanum
- The Angels among the Liars
- Money and Dürer
- Black Harbor
- Summer Island
- Blue Yacht
- Travel
- Folly
- Green Island
- The King of Black Pudding
- Flour Mites as Moral Beings
- This Island
- from Sullen Weedy Lakes
- Moorhen
- Capability Brown in the Tropics
- The Rivers of England
- Banana Republics
- Debora Sleeping
- Christ Church, Oxford / 26 October 1881
- 3-13 September 1752
- The Underground
- Racial Prejudice in Imperial Rome
- Major Graves
- To the Honourable Committee
- James at Sixty
- Haddocks' Eyes
- Ambassador of Imperfect Mood
- from Vain Empires
- The Secession of Science from Christian Europe
- Christ among the Moneychangers, 1929
- The Long Vacations
- A Version of Pastoral
- The Advent of Common Law in Littoral Pursuits
- Florida Pest Control
- The Shadow-Line
- Van Gogh in the Pulpit
- Britain without Baedeker
- Tristes Tropiques
- The Burning Man
- Animal Actors on the English Stage after 1642
- Flower, of Zimbabwe
- Keats in India
- from Night Battle
- Florida in January
- Sundays in the South
- Mother on the St. Johns
- from Long Island Sins
- Blues for Penelope
- Nothing
- The English Light
- Larkin
- from Paradise Lost
- Song
- For the Hostages
- The Words
- Dear AC
- Dear DD
- My Father as Madame Butterfly
- Pera Palas
- Alexander Sarcophagus
About the author
William Logan has published eight books of poetry and five books of essays and reviews. Among his many awards are the Corrington Medal for Literary Excellence, the Allen Tate Prize, the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, the inaugural Randall Jarrell Prize for Poetry Criticism, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He teaches at the University of Florida and has been called the “most hated man in American poetry” as well as the “pre-eminent poet-critic of his generation,” and the “best poetry critic in America.”
