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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.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
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.
Introduction: Poetry and the Demon of History
Dickinson’s Nothings
Verse Chronicle: Song and Dance
Verse Chronicle: Collateral Damage
The Iliad, Reloaded (Alice Oswald)
The Beasts and the Bees (Carol Ann Duffy)
Two Gents (August Kleinzahler and William Stafford)
Kipling Old and New
Frost at Letters
Verse Chronicle: Seeing the Elephant
Verse Chronicle: Civil Power
Seven Types of Ambivalence: On Donald Justice
A Literary Friendship (Donald Justice and Richard Stern)
Randall Jarrell at the Y
Flowers of Evil (David Lehman)
Verse Chronicle: The Glory Days
Verse Chronicle: Doing as the Romans Do
Meeting Mr. Hill
The Death of Geoffrey Hill
Two Strangers (Marie Ponsot and Ishion Hutchinson)
The Jill Bialosky Case
Jill Bialosky, New Revelations
Verse Chronicle: Under the Skin
Verse Chronicle: Foreign Affairs
Mrs. Custer’s Tennyson
Sent 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 Away
Verse Chronicle: Hither and Yon
Pound’s China / Pound’s Cathay
Interview with Jonathan Hobratsch (2015)
Afterword: The Way We Live Now
Permissions
Books Under Review
Index of Authors Reviewed