Bøger af Christopher Logue

Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly,Emptying her blood-red mouth-set in her ice-white face-Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked:"Kill! Kill for me!Better to die than live without killing!"Who says prayer does no good?Christopher Logue's work in progress, his Iliad, has been called "the best translation of Homer since Pope's" (The New York Review of Books). Here in All Day Permanent Red is doomed Hector, the lion, "slam-scattering the herd" at the height of his powers. Here is the Greek army rising with a sound like a "sky-wide Venetian blind." Here is an arrow's tunnel, "the width of a lipstick," through a neck. Like Homer himself, Logue is quick to mix the ancient and the new, because his Troy exists outside time, and no translator has a more Homeric interest in the truth of battle, or in the absurdity and sublimity of war.

He has published his poems in many forms, including - again his own invention - New Numbers, a constantly changing collage, which appears here in its final form. The selection culminates in an early treatment of a passage from his version of Homer's Iliad - 'the best .

For the second half of his long life, Christopher Logue (1926-2011) - political rebel, inventor of the poster poem, pioneer of poetry and jazz - was at work on a very different project: a rewriting of Homer's Iliad. The volumes that appeared from War Music (1981) onwards were distinct from translations, in that they set out to be a radical reimagining and reconfiguration of Homer's tale of warfare, human folly and the power of the gods, in a language and style of verse that were emphatically modern. As each instalment, from Kings to Cold Calls, was published, it became clear that this was to be Logue's masterpiece.Sadly, illness prevented him from finishing it. Enough, however, of his projected final volume, Big Men Falling a Long Way, survives in notebook drafts to give a clear sense of its shape, as well as some of its dramatic high points. These have been gathered into an appendix by Logue's friend and one-time editor, Christopher Reid. The result comes as near as possible to representing the poet's complete vision, and confirms what his admirers have long known, that Logue's Homer is one of the great poems of our time.

Prince Charming is the story of Christopher Logue: one of our great poets and literary mavericks, part of a circle that included Kenneth Tynan and Richard Ingrams. There are enough characters among the less well-known - from the author's father to the Portobello Road street-trader 'Minky' Warren - to stock a lively novel.