William Logan
Penguin Books, 1998
ISBN: 0140588949
Vanity corrupts the empires on the grand tour from ancient Rome to revolutionary Iran, from Europe in the Age of Reason to America in the Age of Television. The poems find Ovid in a London gentlemen’s club, Romeo and Juliet in Florida, and the varnished splendors of religion and politics surviving at the seedy edge of culture. Logan is one of the rare poets who makes every poem matter. In its resonant vision, Vain Empires is a book breathtakingly intense in language, disturbing in its moral intelligence.
