Most reviews don’t deserve this kind of permanence. Logan’s do. <i>Broken Ground</i> is a showcase of his vastly learned and extraordinarily sensitive expertise on poetic language.

- William Flesch, author of <i>Comeuppance: Altruistic Punishment, Costly Signaling, and other Biological Components of Fiction</i>,

This bracing collection of often lacerating criticism from poet Logan pierces the heart of poetry, revealing ‘what a poem is concealing.’ Logan showcases his ability to cut to the core of a poet’s or poem’s shortcomings . . . His candid criticism enlivens an often-stale atmosphere.

Publishers Weekly

Logan has certainly been a lightning rod among contemporary poet-critics. Some readers are outraged by what they feel are gratuitously personal attacks; others appreciate his mordant wit and trenchant style. For others still, his reviews are a welcome tonic to the fatuous and overblown style of the day, even a 'guilty pleasure.'

The Hudson Review

In Broken Ground, William Logan explores the works of canonical and contemporary poets, rediscovering the lushness of imagination and depth of feeling that distinguish poetry as a literary art. The book includes long essays on Emily Dickinson’s envelopes, Ezra Pound’s wrestling with Chinese, Robert Frost’s letters, Philip Larkin’s train station, and Mrs. Custer’s volume of Tennyson, each teasing out the depths beneath the surface of the page.Broken Ground also presents the latest run of Logan’s infamous poetry chronicles and reviews, which for twenty-five years have bedeviled American verse. Logan believes that poetry criticism must be both adventurous and forthright—and that no reader should settle for being told that every poet is a genius. Among the poets under review by the “preeminent poet-critic of his generation” and “most hated man in American poetry” are Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Paul Muldoon, John Ashbery, Geoffrey Hill, Louise Glück, John Berryman, Marianne Moore, Frederick Seidel, Les Murray, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Johnny Cash, James Franco, and the former archbishop of Canterbury.Logan’s criticism stands on the broken ground of poetry, soaked in history and soiled by it. These essays and reviews work in the deep undercurrents of our poetry, judging the weak and the strong but finding in weakness and strength what endures.
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William Logan explores the works of canonical and contemporary poets, rediscovering the lushness of imagination and depth of feeling that distinguish poetry as a literary art. Broken Ground also presents the latest run of Logan’s infamous poetry chronicles and reviews, which for twenty-five years have bedeviled American verse.
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AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Poetry and the Demon of HistoryDickinson’s NothingsVerse Chronicle: Song and DanceVerse Chronicle: Collateral DamageThe Iliad, Reloaded (Alice Oswald)The Beasts and the Bees (Carol Ann Duffy)Two Gents (August Kleinzahler and William Stafford)Kipling Old and NewFrost at LettersVerse Chronicle: Seeing the ElephantVerse Chronicle: Civil PowerSeven Types of Ambivalence: On Donald JusticeA Literary Friendship (Donald Justice and Richard Stern)Randall Jarrell at the YFlowers of Evil (David Lehman)Verse Chronicle: The Glory DaysVerse Chronicle: Doing as the Romans DoMeeting Mr. HillThe Death of Geoffrey HillTwo Strangers (Marie Ponsot and Ishion Hutchinson)The Jill Bialosky CaseJill Bialosky, New RevelationsVerse Chronicle: Under the SkinVerse Chronicle: Foreign AffairsMrs. Custer’s TennysonSent to Coventry: (Larkin’s “I Remember, I Remember”)The State of Criticism (On Being Asked to Write on the “State of Criticism”)The Perils of Reviewing (On Being Asked, “What Are the Perils of Criticism?”)Verse Chronicle: Home and AwayVerse Chronicle: Hither and YonPound’s China / Pound’s CathayInterview with Jonathan Hobratsch (2015)Afterword: The Way We Live NowPermissionsBooks Under ReviewIndex of Authors Reviewed
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780231201063
Publisert
2021-05-11
Utgiver
Vendor
Columbia University Press
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
AldersnivĂĽ
G, 01
SprĂĽk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet

Forfatter

Biographical note

William Logan is Alumni/ae Professor at the University of Florida. He is the author of seven books of criticism, most recently Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past (Columbia, 2018), and eleven books of poetry. Logan has won the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, the Allen Tate Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.