Someone has left a spear stuck in the sand

[sovay]

Oh, hell! Christopher Logue. And the sixth volume of War Music still unfinished.

Achilles' face
Is like a chalkpit fringed with roaring wheat.
His brain says: "Kill him. Let the Greeks sail home."
His thigh steels flex.

I am totally watching him as Swinburne in Ken Russell's Dante's Inferno (1967).

Comments

[sovay]

That's magnificent stuff.

I read War Music not because I was assigned it at Brandeis, but because I knew someone who was; I bought my own copy. I got the latest and now last volume from the bookstore at Yale, where I didn't even know he'd written it until I saw it there on the shelf, a thin, pollen-colored paperback from Faber and Faber with the title, as it should be, in scarlet red:

Diomed found, and threw, a stone
As heavy as a cabbage made of lead,
That hit, and split, Aenéas' hip.
Who went down on one knee
And put his shield hand on the grass
And with his other hand covered his eyes.
Dido might have become a grandmother
And Rome not had its day, except
As Diomed came on to lop his top
Aenéas' mama, Aphrodité (dressed
In grey silk lounge pyjamas piped with gold
And snake-skin flip-flops) stepped
Between him and the Greek.
A glow came from her throat, and from her hair
A fragrance that betokened the divine.
Stooping, she kissed him better, as
Queen Hera whispered: "Greek, cut that bitch."
And, Diomed, you did; nicking Love's wrist.