There's a fair bit of chaff in this retrospective, but when Logue's on song he's a match for any English poet of the second half of the 20th century. Stuff like "When I was serving my country" and "Caption for a Photograph of Four Organized Criminals" blends the personal and political as deftly as his contemporaries Gavin Ewart (of whom Logue reminds me) and Peter Reading, and his later work — "Fragment" and "New Numbers" especially — reads like an updating of Eliot with its easy but insistent iambs and many-angled narrative voice. There's a very funny invective against a neighbor who mutilates Logue's tree. There's an extract from his monumental "War Music" included too, but you should read that in its entirety. I loved this one (could you call it an ecLogue?):

Things

The sun shines on the fields and on the town.
Far in the distance by the mill
A man in blue is gardening.
A cat sleeps on a window-sill.
At a bar, two gentlemen discuss the latest Aston-Martin.

A boy and girl by a railway bridge.
The girl holds up her face. Is kissed.
The train that passes by contains
A general and a scientist
Delighting in each other's brains.

In a quiet place a woman of fifty dressed in black,
With a newspaper across her face,
Dreams that she is young and slim.
The front page of the paper says:
I MARRIED A SEXUAL MANIAC
And the back page says:
SKIRTS WILL BE SHORTER IN THE SPRING.

The lovers go their separate ways.
She feels he only wants one thing.
He feels he's misunderstood.
The man who has been gardening
Cleans his spade with a bit of wood.
And the sun goes down on the fields and on the town.

Selected Poems of Christopher Logue

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