William Logan won the National Book Circle award for Criticism for The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin which is a horrible book full of faint praise.
I love reading poetry and really try to be positive in my reviews, since I have some sense of how hard it is to write anything even half way interesting. Also, I have been on a long string of great books of poetry.
I had trouble with this book–and not just the horrible cover, but lines like:
Back and Forth like a mace
.
just really annoy me, not simply for the Poet-ry-ness, but also because they are printed without comment. And he quotes Brad Pitt (the actor) from Seven not the writer of the screenplay. And he uses IM to mean In Memorial. Just all sorts of things that bother me.
And this is not an isolated example:
Some things had been in storage twenty years,
yet still she greeted each with pretty tears,
I mean really! I would have been torn to bits in 10th grade for something like that. The book ends with this poetic retelling of chinese torture and execution which is a strange aftertaste for a book thats content contains very little that is challenging–excusing the horrible cover yet again; and so, in an effort to remember this book fondly I am going to create my own poem using this text.
In a lot of the poems he ends with a little one line zinger–I am going to connect all of these zingers, into:
Strange Flesh
For there is poetry in wildness, and every alligator basking in the slime is in himeslf an Epic, self-contained.
–Martin Chuzzlewit by William Logan
It took the rest of her life to settle the score
back and forth like a mace
at the nothing that is nothing.
Passes the eye in downward flight
like toys abandoned by the giant’s baby
pilgrims whose pilgrimages were mistaken,
the ghosts of innocents played.
Until the alien sun burned across the snow,
steam floated above the waters like a crown,
and the high explosive of modern architecture..
Except, cemented into the bricks, the iron ring.
I.M. William Logan
That is likely better then anything in the book itself!
David Given Schwarm 
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