Home Front: Bulletproof . Stateside . Clamor . Atmospherics

by Bryony Doran, Jehanne Dubrow, Elyse Fenton

Overview

Even in peacetime, many women find themselves isolated in a wartime of their own when their loved ones are involved in conflicts overseas. As mothers or wives they live in a state of separation, from husbands, sons or daughters in permanent danger – or so they feel – as well as from an often alienating everyday world of people who have no idea of what anxieties and fears grip them every minute. They also find themselves switching back and forth between two time zones, between the present moment and what might have been happening several hours ago in the Middle East.

Home Front presents the poetry of four such women, Bryony Doran and Isabel Palmer, both mothers of young British soldiers serving in Afghanistan; and two American poets, Jehanne Dubrow, wife of a serving US naval officer deployed to the Persian Gulf and other conflict zones, and Elyse Fenton, wife of a US army medic posted to Iraq. It brings together four full-length collections by these writers; those by the two British poets are debut collections first published in full in this book.

The poems in Bryony Doran’s Bulletproof tell a chronological story, from her son’s unexpected decision to join the army through his tour in and return from Afghanistan. Covering every emotion from fear to fury, yet lifted by humour and details of everyday domestic life, these are poems written to preserve a pacifist mother’s sanity as each day plays itself out. They show her coping with The News, her fantasies, his short spells of home leave, and her realisation that both are imprisoned in a modern myth.

The narrative in Isabel Palmer’s Atmospherics begins with seeing her only son go to war in Afghanistan soon after his 21st birthday in 2011 and ends with his final, safe return in 2015. His role there was to lead foot patrols and to operate machines for detecting improvised explosive devices. While he was on tour, she wrote one poem every week reflecting on their experiences. The earlier poems appeared in Ground Signs (Flarestack Poets, 2014), a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice.

Driven by intellectual curiosity and emotional exploration, the poems in Jehanne Dubrow’s Stateside (2010) are remarkable for their subtlety, sensual imagery and technical control. The speaker attempts to understand her own life through the long history of military wives left to wait and wonder, invoking Penelope’s plight in Homer’s Odyssey as a model but also as a source of mystery. Dubrow is fearless in her contemplation of the far-reaching effects of war but even more so in her excavation of a marriage under duress.

At times quiet, at others cacophonous, the poems of Elyse Fenton’s Clamor turn a lyric lens on the language we use to talk about war and atrocity, and the irreconcilable rifts – between lover and beloved, word and thing – such work unearths. Originally published in the US – but not in the UK – in 2010, Clamor was the first book of poetry to win Britain’s Dylan Thomas Prize.

Ruth Padel on Bryony Doran’s Bulletproof:
‘A unique collection, telling a story as old as poetry itself but also horribly contemporary. Spare, compassionate, calmly crafted and sometimes funny, but also gripping and very moving, the poems introduce us to a dry, fresh and unmistakably original voice.’

Denise Saul & Luke Kennard (PBS Bulletin) on Isabel Palmer:
‘A powerful poetic sequence… Several poems are close to heartbreaking… Ground Signs is an emotionally raw, uncompromising portrayal which is nonetheless crafted by a uniquely lyrical sensibility, and it’s that ability to handle the material with such care which gives the sequence its power.’

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780373270
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	11/11/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	250
File size:	573 KB

About the Author

Bryony Doran’s first novel, The China Bird, won the Hookline novel competition in 2008 and was published in 2009, and followed in 2013 by her short story collection, The Sand Eggs. She has written and performed poetry for many years and completed an MA in Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. Her first collection, Bulletproof, is included in Home Front (with collections by Jehanne Dubrow, Elyse Fenton and Isabel Palmer), published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2016. Born in a youth hostel on Dartmoor, she grew up in Cornwall and studied fashion at Manchester before moving to Yorkshire. She lives in Sheffield with her partner Bill Allerton, who is also a writer, and has one son.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of six poetry collections, including most recently The Arranged Marriage (University of New Mexico Press, 2015), Red Army Red (Northwestern, 2012) and Stateside (Northwestern, 2010), the latter included in Home Front (with collections by Bryony Doran, Elyse Fenton and Isabel Palmer) published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2016. Two poems from Stateside appeared in Neil Astley’s anthology The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), and one was included in Midland Creative Projects touring production, The Hundred Years’ War: from the Somme to Afghanistan. A further collection, Dots & Dashes, is due from Southern Illinois University Press in 2017. Her second book, From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writers’ Poetry Competition (2009), and her first, The Hardship Post (2009), won the Three Candles Press Open Book Award and was recently re-released in a new edition by Sundress Publications (2013). She co-edited The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems About Perfume (Literary House Press, 2014). She has received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Towson University Prize for Literature, an Individual Artist’s Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Sosland Foundation Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. The daughter of American diplomats, Jehanne was born in Italy and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas. She also serves as the Series Editor of the Literary House Press and is the founder and editor of the literary journal Cherry Tree.
Elyse Fenton is the author of the poetry collections, Clamor (Cleveland University Press), winner of the 2010 University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize and Sweet Insurgent (Saturnalia 2017), the former included in Home Front (with collections by Bryony Doran, Jehanne Dubrow and Isabel Palmer) published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2016. She is the recipient of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize, the Cleveland State University First Book Award, the Pablo Neruda Award and the Bob Bush Memorial Award, and was selected a New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America. Her poetry and prose has been published in The New York Times, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, The White Review, Pleiades and Prairie Schooner, and has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and PRI’s The World. She has worked in the woods, on farms and in schools in Texas, New England, Mongolia, and the Pacific Northwest, and lives with her family in Portland, Oregon.