Christopher Logue
Christopher Logue was born in Portsmouth in 1926. His lived in Paris from 1951-56 where he published his first book of poetry, Wand and Quadrant, described as ‘not bad’ by Ezra Pound. He worked on the magazine Merlin which published early work by Samuel Beckett and he produced pornography for Editions de Minuit under the name of Count Palmiro Vicarion.
Returning to England he wrote plays for the Royal Court Theatre, including The Lily White Boys and The Trial of Cob and Leach. He wrote the script for Ken Russell’s film Savage Messiah and appeared in Russell’s The Devils as Cardinal Richelieu. For many years from 1961 he was a contributor to Private Eye.
During the 1960s he published 20 Verse Posters and he was a pioneer of the poetry and jazz movement with his recording of his translations of Pablo Neruda, Red Bird, made with Tony Kinsey.
A commission from BBC radio in 1959 to produce a version of part of Homer’s Iliad led him to begin on the work that has become known collectively as War Music, a poetic re-imagining of the Greek original, emphatically not a translation.
Audiologue, a seven-cd set of recordings of his work was issued in 1999 by Unknown Public.
The latest part of War Music, All Day Permanent Red, won the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2004
Selected Titles
Wand and Quadrant (Paris, 1953)
The Weakdream Sonnets (Paris, 1955)
Devil, Maggot and Son (Tonbridge Wells, 1956)
Songs (London 1959)
Patrocleia (London, 1962)
Pax, episodes from the Iliad, Book XIX (London, 1967)
New Numbers (London, 1969)
Singles (London, 1973)
Ode to the Dodo, collected poems (London, 1981)
War Music, An account of books 16 to 19 of Homer’s Iliad (London, 1981)
Kings, an account of Books One and Two of Homer’s Iliad (London, 1991)
The Husbands, an account of Books Three and Four of Homer’s Iliad (London, 1994)
Selected Poems (London, 1996)
Christopher Logue, a bibliography, 1952-97, by George Ramsden (Settrington, 1997)
Prince Charming (Faber and Faber 1999)
War Music (Faber and Faber, 2001)
All Day Permanent Red, the first battle scenes of Homer’s Iliad (London, 2003)