Broken Ground

William Logan is Alumni/ae Professor at the University of Florida. He is the author of seven books of criticism, most recently Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past (Columbia, 2018), and eleven books of poetry. Logan has won the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, the Allen Tate Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Poetry and the Demon of HistoryDickinson’s NothingsVerse Chronicle: Song and DanceVerse Chronicle: Collateral DamageThe Iliad, Reloaded (Alice Oswald)The Beasts and the Bees (Carol Ann Duffy)Two Gents (August Kleinzahler and William Stafford)Kipling Old and NewFrost at LettersVerse Chronicle: Seeing the ElephantVerse Chronicle: Civil PowerSeven Types of Ambivalence: On Donald JusticeA Literary Friendship (Donald Justice and Richard Stern)Randall Jarrell at the YFlowers of Evil (David Lehman)Verse Chronicle: The Glory DaysVerse Chronicle: Doing as the Romans DoMeeting Mr. HillThe Death of Geoffrey HillTwo Strangers (Marie Ponsot and Ishion Hutchinson)The Jill Bialosky CaseJill Bialosky, New RevelationsVerse Chronicle: Under the SkinVerse Chronicle: Foreign AffairsMrs. Custer’s TennysonSent to Coventry: (Larkin’s “I Remember, I Remember”)The State of Criticism (On Being Asked to Write on the “State of Criticism”)The Perils of Reviewing (On Being Asked, “What Are the Perils of Criticism?”)Verse Chronicle: Home and AwayVerse Chronicle: Hither and YonPound’s China / Pound’s CathayInterview with Jonathan Hobratsch (2015)Afterword: The Way We Live NowPermissionsBooks Under ReviewIndex of Authors Reviewed

Most reviews don’t deserve this kind of permanence. Logan’s do. Broken Ground is a showcase of his vastly learned and extraordinarily sensitive expertise on poetic language.