Night Battle (Poets, Penguin)

Breathtakingly intense poems about language, love, and the loss of purity in the world

Logan's newest work, The Night Battle, reveals to readers a rich, sensuous world where even pigeons "roost in judgment" like "mottled, maculate angels" and Long Island mothers lounge at a swimming club drinking the politeness of servants "like a sin" while "summer broke the dark with lightning storms." A section of the book entitled "Milton's Tongue" finds an old college "gaudy with painted ghosts" and an ancient church filled with "antique lives we have no common language with, except that they too were lies." Donald Hall, writing in the Iowa Review, said, "Logan writes like an angel--an elegant, literary angel." Indeed, Logan's world is populated not only by angels, but also by the lost souls of great poets and humble country people alike--it is a rich, sensuous world aching to retain beauty in a landscape pocked by sin.

Like Ovid on the Black Sea, the restless stranger
might feel such cruel beauty monotonous.
But, inshore, a crusty alligator steams,
nosing into reeds to let off passengers
or take on canvas sacks of mail,
as if the weather had never once been tender
or required, like love, a moment of surrender.
--from "Florida in January"

* Logan's last collection, Vain Empires, was a New York Times Notable Book