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“... Two limestone plates support the Aegean world. The greater Anatolian still lies flat, But half an eon past, through silent eyes:            ‘Ave!’ God watched the counterplate subside, until Only its top and mountain tops remained Above His brother, Lord Poseidon’s, sea:            ‘And that, I shall call Greece. And those, Her Archipelago,’ said He ...”

“... Someone has left a spear stuck in the sand.This extract is published to mark the release of Christopher Logue’s reading of his poem ‘War Music’ on audiobook for the first time, on the tenth anniversary of his death.Sections of the poem were first published in the ‘London Review’:PreambleBig Men Falling a Long ...”

“... Sunset.    Greece to its ships to eat and sleep. But Achilles could not sleep Because he could not stop himself Thinking about Patroclus.    How in this war or that They saved each other’s lives a dozen times a day, Or how rash words died in him at Patroclus’ glance.    He tried this side, then that. Then he got up and went down to the beach, Refettered Hector’s ankles to his chariot’s step, And galloped the cadaver – kept from harm by visitant hands – Round and around the embers of his true heart’s pyre ...”

“... There’s a moment in this book – some time in the 1960s – when Christopher Logue and Adrian Mitchell have been asked to Hintlesham Hall in Suffolk to do a poetry reading. They ring the doorbell and a liveried footman tells them that they should go to the servants’ entrance. ‘I said, let’s leave. “No,” Adrian said ...”

“... For Christopher Logue The talk-radio host is trying to shake the wacko with only a minute left to get in the finance and boner-pill spots before signing off, the morning news team already at the door and dairy vans streaming from the gates of WholesomeBest, fanning out across the vast plateau. Fair skies, high cumulus cloud – the birds are in full throat as dawn ignites in the east, rinsing the heavens with a coral pink ...”

“... Christopher Logue​ dwelled in a state of perpetual agitation that ranged from unbridled curiosity and enthusiasm to unbridled indignation and exasperation. If one were to find him at rest between the two poles, one wouldn’t have to wait long for the weather to shift dramatically. He was like that when I first met him in Melbourne, sometime in the 1980s, when he was sixty or so, and remained so over the course of our friendship ...”

“... one can be certain whether adults are speaking seriously, or think it funny if they are not. Christopher Logue who has compiled The Children’s Book of Comic Verse for Batsford, and Julia Watts in The Children’s Book of Funny Verse (Faber), have both grasped the essentials about a child’s sense of humour – far better than the 1935 editors of ...”

“... Christopher Logue’s War Music is not ‘a translation in the accepted sense’. It’s not clear why, having said this, he should invoke Johnson’s remark that a translation’s merit should be judged by ‘its effect as an English poem’, since Johnson was talking about translations, whereas Logue’s poem is a variety of ‘poetical imitation’ and belongs to a perfectly good tradition of English poems based on or played off against an older (often Classical) original ...”

“... I first came across Christopher Logue’s ‘account’ of the Iliad in 1975 at Oxford where I went to hear a vigorous reading by two young men of Patrocleia, his version of Book XVI. It was an opportunity to experience the poem in its original medium, by the ear rather than the eye. Homer himself had probably chanted his verses plucking the strings of a lyre, like the bard Demodocus in the Odyssey and for many centuries after his death people did not read Homer: they listened to skilled rhapsodes, whose dramatic delivery mesmerised audiences and earned the performers ample rewards, as we know from Plato’s Ion ...”

“... tragedies – he was happy schoolmastering Gilbert Murray, R.C. Trevelyan, Robert Fitzgerald, and Christopher Logue – and some lively words on Spenser, George Herbert and Norse sagas. These pieces are interesting, but it’s a pity he didn’t take his journalism seriously. I think he was damaged by a theory he held about ‘double-level poetry’, as ...”

“... The Thief’s Journal, Lolita, various unreadable works by Henry Miller, pornographic novels by Christopher Logue and Alexander Trocchi, a para-Beat from Glasgow, and Trocchi’s ghosted volume of the Frank Harris memoirs (Trocchi was Olympia’s ‘top all-out literary stallion’, according to Girodias). Olympia went on to publish two more works by ...”

“... up to the action, a third of the Committee of 100, among them Robert Bolt, Arnold Wesker and Christopher Logue, as well as Bertrand Russell and his wife, had been sent to jail, accused of inciting ‘members of the public to commit breaches of the peace’.This massive PR blunder on the government’s part ensured that on 17 September Trafalgar ...”

“... for Nuclear Disarmament and, on the first Aldermaston march, ‘walked with Doirs Lessing, Christopher Logue and Kenneth Tynan’. Twice he was arrested and Vicky drew him as a convict in broad arrows. The year 1968 found him with the insurgents in the Sorbonne, but in Britain ‘few shared my enthusiasm for the students of Paris.’ In many ways ...”

“... unHomeric orchestration which leaves out the reference to the Greeks’ low morale. In Kings, Christopher Logue’s rewriting of Books One and Two (a kind of sequel to his War Music, 1981, a version of Books Sixteen to Nineteen), the line is rendered: ‘And as it is with soldiers, / Sad as we were a laugh or two went up.’ Two changes stand ...”

“... appreciated. Great poets may make what they like out of them, and other poets (such as Lowell and Christopher Logue) may subject them to specialised sorts of updating in their own verse. Logue in particular, with his versions of Homer, is engaged in the often valuable as well as always fashionable business of bringing ...”