488
PARTISAN REVIEW
'ere tek this un wi'yer to New York
to remind yer
~w
us gaffers used to talk.
The broken lines go through me speeding South–
As t'Doctor stopped to oppen woodland yet .
and
wi'skill they putten wuds reet
i'
his mouth.
-"The Queen's English"
Reading a number of Harrison's poems in sequence, however,
one starts to feel the ear go a bit slack at the monotony of the
rhythms. And occasionally the suspicion arises that the poet finds it
rather easy to "do" a certain kind of poem. Or that rhyme is the prin–
cipal mode of transport from one notion to the next. This is espe–
cially evident in some of the longer poems he includes -"The White
Queen" and "A Kumquat for John Keats" - where the ceremony of
marrying two word sounds seems more important than the love
which purportedly brought them together. The bulk of the book,
though, remains original, thoroughly convincing in its projection of
embattled identity.
Most readers of poetry by now know the story behind Christo–
pher Logue's
War Music: An Account oj Books
16
to
19
oj Homer's Iliad:
how Donald Carne-Ross, then at the BBC, invited (or incited) the
poet to try his hand at rendering parts of the
Iliad;
how Logue had
'
the temerity, being without Greek , to stitch together - cutting, tak-
\
ing cues from other versions,
inventing-what
has proved to be an
astonishingly beautiful
sui generis
artifact. Is it an
Iliad?
I think even
Logue would say no. For one thing, he has eliminated precisely
those elements, the stock words and phrases, upon which its status
as an oral epic was based (according to Milman Parry and Albert
Lord) . But it
is
a living, breathing entity, a poem that builds itselfup
not from the manipulation of translated idioms but from fres hly im–
agined -newly seen, tested , felt-details and sensations.
Logue has isolated the episodes that make up Book 16, or
Patrocleia-which,
he notes in his preface, "might be described as a
miniature version of the
Iliad,"
and which cu lminates in the death of
Patroclus - through Book
19,
or
Pax,
which has "disaffected allies
settling their differences in order to avoid defeat at the hands of a
mutual enemy."
But plot is not so important here . What will mesmerize the
reader is the sharp, swift, sensuous presentation of a wholly gripping
