After the first three volumes, War Music, Kings and Husbands, there was a worrying, eight-year gap in the work-in-progress that has come to be known as Logue's Homer. All Day Permanent Red appeared two years ago, reassuringly, and now Cold Calls continues the sequence of narrative verse.
A final volume is promised to complete this remarkable project, which originated in an inspired commission by BBC radio in the 1950s from English poet, playwright and screenwriter Christopher Logue, now aged 79.
The early volumes were described as an "account" of selected books of Homer's Iliad, while All Day Permanent Red bore the subtitle, "the first battle scenes of the Iliad re-written". Attempts at classification and discussions of terminology seem unavoidable, since the poem sequence is not a translation, nor an adaptation. It echoes Homer, but has its own unmistakeably original voice, harsh but beautiful.
Unlike many contemporary poets who have created versions of Greek texts, Logue does not read any Greek. He bases his extended poem on the accumulated richness of existing English translations, including Chapman's and Pope's, and on his reading of classical scholars; his approach is similar to that of playwrights who write versions of European stage classics without knowledge of the original language. In his memoir, Prince Charming, Logue describes his process as "re-composition", which seems closest to the mark. The Homeric text is only a starting point, the substratum of a collage.
Many of the elements that made War Music so thrilling are evident again in Cold Calls, especially the goryness of the battle scenes on the plains of Troy, reminding us of the crude reality of men spearing and hacking each other to death: "His head was opened, egglike, at the back,/ Mucked with thick blood, blood trickling from his mouth."
Here again are the startling, anachronistic images, similes and juxtapositions ("All time experts in hand-to-hand action -/ Fricourt, Okinawa, Stalingrad West -/ Could not believe the battle would gain/ But it did"); the spareness of the language; the powerful rhythmic drive; the contemporary allusions; the sly humour; the sudden shifts in pace and perspective approximating filmic techniques of jump-cuts and panning shots, giving us the gods'-eye view of the battlefield from Mount Olympus. "The Holy Family", as Logue calls them, are whimsical and amoral throughout, easily bored by the troubles of mortals and viciously competitive.
Logue has substituted a flexible iambic pentameter line for Homer's dactylic hexameter and combined that with half lines and single-word lines, to great dramatic effect.
He uses typographical spacing for emphasis and to mark shifts in time and location. At one point in War Music, the single word "Apollo!" shouts diagonally across a double page in huge typesize. In Cold Calls, double-spaced short lines proliferate ("Sea./Sky./ The sunlit snow"), as if language itself is now shrinking from what it is being called on to describe ."Beyond/ The wastes of space/ Before/ The blue."
The collage is becoming looser, the diction even more terse.
Having begun his "account", in War Music, with the return of Achilles into the battle to avenge the death of his beloved companion Patroclus (Books 16-19 of the Iliad), Logue then jumped back to the beginning of the epic, focusing on the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles (Kings) and the duel of Menelaus and Paris (Husbands).
All Day Permanent Red, whose title comes from a lipstick advertisement, recreates the Iliad's early battle scenes (Books 5-8) with their set-piece confrontations between pairs of leading Greek and Trojan warriors. The volume presents even more forensically rendered carnage, but less perceptive characterisation than his earlier instalments.
In Cold Calls (based on Books 9 and 10) we have both the adrenalin of the battlefield - with Hera, Athena and Aphrodite lending divine support - and the drama of the personal conflicts between the Greeks. With Achilles still sulking in his tent, refusing to fight, the Greek forces are under pressure, forced back to their ships. (Although Logue loves to refer to contemporary culture - "Dark glasses in parked cars" - he refrains from mentioning either Roy Keane or Brad Pitt at any stage.)
King Agamemnon, the cause of the trouble, is advised to make overtures to Achilles to heal the breach, and offers all kinds of inducements to persuade him to rejoin the fray. Nestor and Odysseus form a delegation to Achilles, who is implacable ("Do I hate him? Yes, I hate him. Hate him") and refuses the offers. "If he put Heaven in my hand I would not want it."
Logue's rendering of these famous scenes is so compressed that they seem deceptively flat at first. Then the bluntness of Achilles's speech becomes cumulatively powerful, its simplicity distilling the strength of feeling. "You Greeks will not take Troy./ You have disintegrated as a fighting force./ Troy is your cemetery. Blame your king." Snapshots of the heroes' ecstasy in battle, "brimming with homicidal joy", have given way to something quieter and infinitely more bleak. Next instalment please.
Helen Meany is a freelance journalist and critic