Dothead: Poems

Abstract

portray the flood of the Scamander against Achilles is composed of an enormous glacial seiche scouring an Alaskan fjord. The images are not merely interesting for their anachronism. On the morning when Patroclus leads his fateful last assault against the Trojans, Logue describes the dawn with an image worthy of Homer and just as timeless: “First sunlight off the sea like thousands of white birds.” The present edition brings together several of Logue’s independently published collections on The Iliad and includes a final appendix of incomplete work intended for a sixth volume, “Big Men Falling a Long Way.” Poet Christopher Reid collected and edited these fragments, and he introduces them with a thoughtful essay on his process and intention. A cautious editor, Reid is careful to impose none of himself on Logue’s work. The resulting appendix, then, is slim compared to the other sections and obviously incomplete, but Reid, exhibiting the most essential fidelity, urges that even a glimpse into Logue’s completed work is better than nothing. Differing versions and working drafts of passages are the real treasure—the reader is able to see Logue’s mind at work, what the poet tried out, reworked, amended , or discarded. The version we have, with interpretive commentary between most of the fragments to explain its likely state of completion or revision, and where it fits within Logue’s decades-long process with the manuscript, reads with the same pleasure as the previously published volumes. Only a few places in the section lack context , but these shock the reader with the reminder of a life’s work interrupted. Greg Brown Mercyhurst University Amit Majmudar. Dothead: Poems. New York. Knopf. 2016. 104 pages. Poet Amit Majmudar’s one-hundred-page book is frequently eloquent, captivating, and powerful; however, it is also partisan, puerile, and facile. One of the best poems, “Interrogation,” serves as an example of what Majmudar does best. Written in rhyming couplets, the poem narrates a torture session, providing just enough detail to make the reader wince. The poem is bearable because of oblique imagery and the restraint of the form, creating a kind of “braced pain”: “I saw a sun that weighed a kiloton / and the power cord by which it swung.” Another stunning poem is “Steep Ascension,” an elegy for a much-admired writer and intellectual who is dying after eight years of illness. Again, Majmudar uses form (rhyming triplets) to modulate the pathos of the situation: “I saw how age can leave the skull a hill / and the breath a white wind whistling in a hole. / He awoke when a gurney squealed down the hall / . . . and though I told myself that death begins / the work of stocking all the shelves again, / I knew this rare edition would be gone.” This is not to say that the poems are all written in accentual-syllabic, rhymed lines; we encounter prose, free-verse poems, and even a shaped poem. I do mean, however, that the best poems utilize Majmudar’s considerable technical capability in dealing with emotionally charged subjects. In “Ode to a Drone,” we find a dazzling allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Hellraiser , razor-feathered / riser, windhover over / Peshawar.” Here, however, we also have the irritating juxtaposition of Hopkins’s religious ecstasy and the dispassion of a “joystickblithe [gamer]” assassinating unsuspecting victims. Majmudar associates Christianity with violence in other poems as well, particularly in “Lineage,” where he uses the biblical language of lineage (“And Flintlock begat Springfield”) for much of the poem to describe gun proliferation and violence in America. At one point, in describing how to prepare a bullet to fragment upon impact, he writes, “Just take a switchblade to your Ameen Rihani The Book of Khalid Syracuse University Press Considered by many to be the first Arab American novel, The Book of Khalid details the journey, both physical and spiritual, of two young Lebanese men who immigrate to the United States around the turn of the century. When they later return to the Middle East, the ideas that define their two homes come together in one of them to form something unexpected. This edition is augmented by critical essays on the work from noted scholars. Aleksandre...