The result is, above all, brilliantly original, consummately crafted English verse, dominated but by no means constrained by iambic pentameter and, secondarily, fabulous Homer. The cumulative effect is to bring the ethos of Homer to life for English speakers with a vigor and immediacy that surpass every available modern translation. Logue's Homer satisfies the first requirement of a classic: It is a work completely unlike any that came before it. It solves one of the thorniest problems of translation, faithfulness to the original, simply by ignoring it -- by being not a translation but rather an imaginative re-creation. Logue, with unfaltering confidence, sets his own poetic vision supreme and treats the original text as a continuously flowing river of source material, parallel but subordinate. The Greeks had a word for it: hubris. The result is flawed, and sometimes ugly, but it is poetry that shines with greatness.

-- Jamie James

*

American Woman, A Novel; Susan Choi; HarperCollins: 370 pp., $24.95

Politics beckons the artist. The world's vexed histories have a ready-made appeal for readers -- rooting interests, partisan interests, plenty of chances to satisfy the lust for moral outrage. And without our help, we think, history isn't good enough. We all need the actors' motives revealed at a level only the imagination can reach. We need to know the fantasies that made reality. Politics, though, can be a fatal attraction for an artist. In a work of literature, Stendhal famously said, politics is "like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert ... loud and vulgar, and yet a thing it is not possible to ignore." Politics, that is to say, can wreck the texture of imaginative work. Susan Choi here bases her novel on the remnants of the Symbionese Liberation Army -- characters guaranteed to arouse partisanship, contempt or moral opprobrium, all of which would ruin the novel's music. But Choi handles that difficulty with an amazing sense of control.

-- Jay Cantor

*

Any Human Heart, A Novel; William Boyd; Alfred A. Knopf: 500 pp., $24.95

William Boyd has, during the last 20-odd years, garnered the kind of recognition most writers only dream of. His first novel, "A Good Man in Africa," won both the Whitbread Book Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. Ignoring the conventional wisdom that after so auspicious a start, the follow-up has to be an anticlimax, a year later he knocked off "An Ice-Cream War," which not only collected the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize but also was short-listed for the Booker. "Brazzaville Beach" picked up the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, while "The Blue Afternoon" won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award in Britain and this paper's Book Prize in fiction.