This is the second volume of Logue's Homer adaptation, and like its predecessor 'War Music' it is simply stunning. It adapts the first two books of the Iliad to make a wonderfully evocative prose-poem that tells of the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon over the girl Briseis. Perhaps it's best to let it speak for itself; the opening in which Achilles runs to the sea to talk to his mother Thetis:
Think of the east Aegean sea by night,
And in an open bay before that sea
Upwards of 30,000 men
Asleep like spoons among their hightailed ships.
Now look along the moonlit beach, and note
Among the keels that hatch its western dunes
A ten-foot-high reed wall
Faced with black clay and split by a double-doored gate;
Then through that gate a naked man,
Whose beauty's silent power stops your heart,
Half run, half trot, face wet with tears, out past its guard,
And having vanished from their sight
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across a mile of dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath inch-high waves that slide
Over each other's luminescent panes;
Then kneel among those panes, beggar his arms, and pray:
'Out of humiliation, Source, I cry,
Source, hear my voice, and with your presence
Bless my supplication.'
Faber and Faber, 86 pages
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