Difficulty

by William Logan

Here, in this new collection of poems, Logan again demonstrates his suppleness and subtlety. Here are the same arresting images and indelible places. Here, too, is a poet who is challenging without being inaccessible, serious without being pompous. This is the work of real talent, reaching and searching, but always in full command of voice, tone, and pitch. This is, in short, a collection that should be received with genuine rejoicing, the work of a young master well on his way to a great career.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Ian]

I sometimes forget that William is one of the few poets alive today that I actually really like. There is a large portion of this book that just bores me, and many of the poems just cause my eyes to glaze over. This, I think, is when William chooses to be too complicated, to overshadow the simplicity of ideas and images with overcomplex and swampy deluges of metaphor and language play. That having been said, some of these are beautiful, almost even sentimental.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 L8319d 1985