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.

A remarkable hybrid of translation, adaptation, and invention

Picture the east Aegean sea by night,And on a beach aslant its shimmeringUpwards of 50,000 menAsleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.

“Your life at every instant up for– / Gone. / And, candidly, who gives a toss? / Your heart beats strong. Your spirit grips,” writes Christopher Logue in his original version of Homer’s Iliad, the uncanny “translation of translations” that won ecstatic and unparalleled acclaim as “the best translation of Homer since Pope’s” (New York Review of Books).

Logue’s account of Homer’s Iliad is a radical reimagining and reconfiguration of Homer’s tale of warfare, human folly, and the power of the gods in language and verse that is emphatically modern and “possessed of a very terrible beauty” (Slate). Illness prevented him from bringing his version of the Iliad to completion, but enough survives in notebooks and letters to assemble a compilation that includes the previously published volumes War Music, Kings, The Husbands, All Day Permanent Red, and Cold Calls, along with previously unpublished material, in one final illuminating volume arranged by his friend and fellow poet Christopher Reid. The result, War Music, comes as near as possible to representing the poet’s complete vision and confirms what his admirers have long known: that “Logue’s Homer is likely to endure as one of the great long poems of the twentieth century” (Times Literary Supplement).