I like how Logue places the words so they don’t flow smoothly but themselves wallop, slap back, chop and change, in the random and self-contradictory motion with which the sea slaps and recoils when cliff-stopped.

See also the bestellar reviews, complete with rich quote-mosaics, of Adam Nicolson’s magnificent Why Homer Matters and Logue’s War Music, a muscular rendition of several books of the Iliad. 

‘Chopping and changing as a cliff-stopped sea

Wallops, slapbacks its next, that slaps its next, that slaps.’

Source: Christopher Logue, War Music: An account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer’s Iliad, London: Faber and Faber, 2001, p. 70