All Day Permanent Red is the fourth instalment in Christopher Logue’s brilliant blank verse ‘account’ of Homer’s Illiad. I reviewed the first three parts, colllected as War Music, all the way back in Book 1 and loved them. (It’s a scandal that until now, that is still the only work of poetry to be reviewed on the site this year.)
Here we are given the first battle scenes of the Illiad in all their gore and bloodthirstiness. There is little to my earlier review about Logue’s wonderful fusion of modern and ancient, cinema and poetry, poetry and downright crudity. There’s a memorable page where he sets out the dispositions of the armies as though it were a Napoleonic campaign, the name of each warrior boxed, but within the context of the verse. As always with Faber, the slim volume is beautifully printed and bound.
I simply can’t recommend this brilliant literary game any more highly.
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