Strange Flesh

A new collection from a poet acclaimed for his immaculate craft and impressive range

William Logan'S dark, intense, muscular verse has long unsettled some of the standard agreements of American poetry. His eighth collection finds its home in the elsewhere, in the various small towns and ancient cities where the poet has felt some shimmering presence of the past. Logan uncovers the memory of the Leviathan in the Massachusetts fishing village where he was raised, the coupling of gods in Venice at the millennium, and signs of the Flood in Texas. He explores places familiar and unfamiliar, whether tenting on the plains with General Custer or seeing a horrific vision behind the Blaschkas' famous glass models of the invertebrates. The inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah followed strange flesh; in the collapsing real-estate market of the past, this master of formality as well as form discovers the sins of the flesh that still haunt us.

Publishers Weekly

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.)

William Logan is the award-winning author of eight collections of poems and four books of criticism, including The Undiscovered Country, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Florida.