War Music is a dramatic poem based on Homer’s Iliad. Logue worked on it for more than forty years and it was left incomplete at his death in 2011. At the time of this recording it was divided into three parts: Kings, The Husbands, and War Music, the last of which is further divided into three sections: Patrocleia, GBH, and Pax. War Music later became the poem’s general title. Commissioned in the first instance by BBC Radio, War Music changed slightly as it developed, which means that there are a number of small discrepancies between the published and the recorded work.
The Iliad itself is a continuous narrative of some 16,000 lines and is generally thought to be the product of a poetic tradition as much as or even more than of an individual poet. It tells the story of the war fought over the departure of Helen from Greece to Troy.
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“Logue’s vivid and excellent poem is…a thorough reconstruction…The care with which the original has been re-brushed is wonderful. The bright colors and light of the Middle East hit you like a hammer. The sighing humanity of the mortals stands above the brittle gods, who just want to see a good punch-up. Logue has produced a mesmeric poem that bears comparison with Eliot.”
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Paul Pickering, British novelist and playwright