Ranging from acerbic couplets to solemnly tolling verse, William Logan"s newest book explores the soul of man in the soil of his society. In the world of Sullen Weedy Lakes, evolution is a downward spiral, and the changes of life "unhappy ripening." In poetry that is sobering and miraculous, Logan exposes man in his exile, where social order is oppression, and nature the mirror and mimic of his devastation. Logan the observer is often aloof, dryly detailing horrific tableaus, yet in the end he weaves the separate poems into a rare concern and modulated despair. Corruption, oppression, and disease, legitimized by the ghastly pastel stamp of commerce and greed, have mastered and monstered the age; but the sullen weedy lakes of history may yet be sailed by the common, triumphant moorhen. Working against the pale romance of contemporary American verse, Sullen Weedy Lakes is an accomplished collection by a poet of whose early work Richard Howard remarked, "These are the poems in Prospero"s drowned book."