Placing one foot on either side of the pond, William Logan opens his seventh book with epigraphs from Dickens and Melville (the title comes from Melville, and amusingly was also newspaper-speak for the first transatlantic telegraph link). What follows is an intoxicating wallow in decay seen in the terms of a top-heavy cultural legacy, a procedure ascendant in Logan’s poetry at least since Night Battle (1999) and pervasive in Macbeth in Venice (2003). Wandering a principally Floridian landscape (Florida is a sort of placidly wild, déclassé Venice) where the referents of old-world culture have limited purchase, Logan is fascinated by their attenuated ability to redeem the rotting, ragged, weathered, gutted, shattered, peeling, flaked, crumbling, withering, soggy, corrupted, gnawn, and pocked. The mood is “soiled with fin de siècle immanence/as the millennium drains from the clawfoot tub”:

The mortal cooling meat remains immortal
deep in the dying archive of the thistle.
Rapt, pincer-headed, feathers scaled like armor,
the quarreling turkey buzzards kneel to pray
furtively at their Caesar’s decaying corpse.
Draped mournfully in black, they glisten with heat,
the squabbling senate of prairie undertakers
bewildered where the mock religious rite
for raising each new Lazarus goes wrong.

—From The Ides of May

Controlled associations transform this scene so deeply that its objective, physical elements (almost an effort to picture again, having read through) appear impoverished. Logan draws this ability from a Modernist’s stock of references, ear, and a sense of time (acute as Richard Howard’s, but less contained) as just another dimension. He also has a knack for making conscientiously bricklaid lines sound ghostly, often by comparing immaterial objects to material ones (“the oily dusk/settling like coal dust”), and soft or liquid objects to hard ones, especially metals (“the irritated waves edged with silver tinfoil”). The tenors have more substance than the vehicles, which induces a certain passing haziness about what, exactly, in a line is real. Logan’s use of these transmutations is peculiar and, because it presents an egress from the insipid empiricism prevailing in our poetry—an egress that leaves open the possibilities of rationality and precision—promisingly tonic.

The downside of Logan’s style is that it runs very hot and is liable to gothic over-amplification (my appetite for phrases like “forsaken as gods” is not large). Overall, though, guided by the anchoring sequence “Penitence,” the book establishes moderating ratios of past and present, dead and living, that keep the gravity this side of morbid. Poetry of this moral pressure also has a tendency to become cerebral and lose track of the body, but as the book comes to touch on the poet’s childhood and romantic history, this problem is nipped in the bud (and indeed the book’s last words are “frenzied rage of birth.”) The Whispering Gallery does everything right that Macbeth in Venice did and relatively little of what it did wrong—it’s his best book yet.

— D. H. Tracy