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Picture the east Aegean sea by night,And on a beach aslant its shimmering Upwards of 50,000 menAsleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet. For more than forty years, the English poet, wit, and troublemaker Christopher Logue (1926-2011) was at work on what came to be regarded as his masterpiece: an idiosyncratic contemporary version of Homer's Iliad. Beginning with the publication of his first volume in 1981 and celebrated as "the best translation of Homer since Pope's" (The New York Review of Books), Logue's project was distinct from conventional translation, for it set out to be a radical reimagining of Homer's take of warfare, human folly, and the power of the gods, in a language and style of verse that were emphatically of Logue's era. While illness prevented him from bringing his version of the Iliad to completion, enough survives in notebooks and letters to allow his friend the poet Christopher Reid to compile a version of the unpublished final installment, Big Men Falling a Long Way. This has been added to the previous parts of the poem, published as War Music (1981), Kings (1991), The Husbands (1995), All Day Permanent Red (2003), and Cold Calls (2005), to make one magisterial volume. This edition comes as near as possible to representing the poet's complete vision, an always surprising, witty, moving, and uncanny performance on the page that is "possessed of a very terrible beauty" (Slate). Here Logue confirms what his admirers have long known: War Music "is likely to endure as one of the great long poems of the twentieth century" (The Times Literary Supplement).
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