BOOKS

Anyone listening?

P.J. Kavanagh

Ode to the Dodo, Poems from 1953 to 1978 Christopher Logue (Cape pp. 176, £6.50 & £3.95) War Music; An account of Books 16 to 19 of Homer's Iliad Christopher Logue (Cape pp. 88, £3.95) Christopher Logue has fought harder than most poets to have his work widely read. Why not? Why else publish? But Ode to the Dodo, Poems 1953-78 (maybe the title says it) can be read as an account of his loss of heart, his inevitable failure to find a popular audience.

In the Fifties he sets out jauntily (poets begin in gladness) as a dandy of language, and with a quick angler's wrist to catch the tug of a mataphor before it slips back to the depths. Then he meets a subject that wholly engages him, his father's death, and he is ready for it. 'For my Father' is a lovely poem; it not only expresses grief it expresses the man who is grieved for. He quotes his father in the poem and it nearly sums up the Logue to come:

Write what you like.

Do something to make other people laugh.

And if at nothing else — at you.

Then, as more time passes, doubt creeps in, about what and whom poetry is for. He sidesteps for a while, makes excursions into a Spanish-type metaphorical luxuriousness in which facts need not be faced too squarely. But more years go by, the doubt grows, and now it comes out unadorned, post-war English, the dandy strips. 'To My Fellow Artists' begins:

Today, it came to me. How you, my friends who write, who draw and carve, friends who make pictures, act, direct, finger delicate instruments.

compose, or fake, or criticise — how, in the oncoming megaton bombardments, all you stand for will be gone like an arrow into hell.

It could be a Daily Mail leader. Such flatness, from a writer as fizzy as Logue, is dreadful; but the writing is on the wall:

Let us remember to leave behind permanent signs. Signs that are easily read.

It is that damned audience-search beginning.

He wants to bring his writing onto the streets — indeed, he wants to bring his writing onto the wall (in the form of posters).

He went in for that quite a bit.The attempt is noble, but doomed. Poetry does not need more popular attention (always more interested in personalities than in poems) it needs more attentiveness, which is never going to be popular. (Which is not to say that poetry should be made difficult on purpose). He turns his hand to fables, with a populist slant, presumably for public consumption, but he is still too exuberant an inventor to make these exactly translucent.

So he tries harder, becomes broader, turns himself into the poetic equivalent of a ton-up vicar:

shall vote Labour because my husband looks like Anthony Wedgwood Benn.

I shall vote Labour because I am obedient. I shall vote Labour because if I do not vote Labour my balls will drop off . . .

and so on for several more, not very jokey, lines. Later, even more desperate, he begins to talk dirty, not to much effect, and rather brutally. Then, further down the graph of despair, the Logue of Private Eye's 'True Stories' seems to take over, many of his poems are about weirdo murders, with an emphasis on violence, using the techniques of film-scripts. Or else they become so little they nearly disappear: vi.

She has not crossed my mind for years: and yet, Seeing her name in an old address book, I flinch.

(That is the whole of the poem entitled `V1'). The failure to identify an audience has exhausted him.

There are good poems scattered through the book: 'The Story of the Road', 'Letters of an Irishman to a Rat', and others, evidence of wit, and sympathy, and gifts. But the decline is there, and surely the result of disappointment. He says so, towards the end of the book:

What am I doing here anyway?

After 53 years I represent no one; I give no comfort; I produce no change. No clamour of a common weal or woe summons the lesser clamour of my tongue to give its resolution clarity.

It is a generous disappointment — CI give no comfort') — and the Shakespeare-rhythms of the last three lines quoted remind the reader how deeply rooted Logue is, for all his slangy posturings, in literary tradition. So it should come as no surprise (though it is a great pleasure) that Logue at last rescues himself, that all the trying-on of masks, side-steps, false directions, can suddenly be seen as warm-ups, as practice shots, for his triumphant rendering of certain passages in Homer in War Games.

Logue gives an account of the genesis of this extraordinary work in his punchy, street-wise Introduction. Asked by the BBC to translate some Homer, and having no Greek, he compared the various translations, from Chapman to E.V. Rieu, and found they all gave a different impression of the original. So, armed with a literal translation, in Homer's word-order, he decided to give an impression of his own, fortified by Dr Johnson's dictum: 'We must try its effect as an English poem, that is the way to judge of the merit of a translation.'

By Johnson's test War Games — as an English poem — is stunning. Logue has battered so long at the walls of the public's indifference to poetry. Now he no longer needs to look for an audience, he can borrow Homer's. All the previous Logues can stand up together and breathe; the dandy:

First light.

Men stand behind the level feathers of their breath.

The populist, when the ordinary soldiers murmur:

But we whoare under the shields know Our enemy marches at the head of the column; And yet we march!

The voice we obey is the voice of the enemy, Yet we obey!

And he who is forever talking about enemies Is himself the enemy.

The describer of violence:

A face split off, Sent skimming lidlike through the crunch, Still smiling, but its pupils dots on dice.

The Shakespearean metaphor-man:

So long and loud and terrible a scream The icy scabs at either end of earth Winced in their sleep . .

He also uses film-script devices and typographical tricks, all the old armoury of effects. He is as determined as ever to get poetry out of the library, and Homer surely nods, in agreement. There are rhythmical lapses, or what sound like them:

Slung from an oiled tendon round his neck A beautifully articulated fish;

After the regular first line it is difficult to read the second unless you say `beautilly' which is not the sort of thing Logue normally requires; he knows actors, is occasionally one himself, and knows they like to wrap their tongues round syllables. But such, infrequent, flaws cannot mar an explosive re-living of the splendours and dignities of barbarism, with its sweating, bloody battles and its accompanying perspectives of near gods and far gods, of clouds, mountains and seas. This is a shining, original (whatever its source), long poem in English. The Muse has forgiven him for trying to abandon her dog-collar for open-necked denim. She had him under her timeless eye all the time, and twitched him back thousands of years so that he could stand unencumbered before his audience at last. I hope he sells a million.