William Logan's poetry has been called elegant, difficult, cranky, formidable, dazzling, intoxicating, and ominous. For almost forty years, he has published poems that do not fit comfortably with the work of most of his contemporaries, and perhaps do not want to fit at all. "Deception Island," a selection from his first five books, is an introduction to the work of a poet who has taken a resistant pleasure in the Byzantine contrivance of Venice, in the empty vision of the American west, and in the romantic longing of British landscape.