Out of Danger: Poems

by James Fenton

Overview

Out of Danger (1994) was Fenton's first collection of poems in ten years, and the poems in it renew and amplify the qualities of unflinching observation and freewheeling verbal play that made his earlier Children in Exile so distinctive and distinguished. The poems in this book's title sequence address the dangers of love, and the love of danger; Fenton proposes that in love, politics, and poetry alike the truth is "something you say at your peril" and yet "something you shouldn't contain." Part II of the book, "Out of the East," is a series of ironical fight songs about political violence— in Manila, the Middle East, Tiananmen Square, and elsewhere. Part III, "Maski Paps," reveals again Fenton's celebrated talents for light-verse nonsense. And in "The Manila Manifesto" he turns his gifts loose upon the world of poetry itself in ways that will both enrage and delight. Out of Danger is refined and daring, jocular and deeply challenging.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374524371
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/30/1995
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.28(d)

About the Author

The celebrated British poet and literary critic James Fenton has been a foreign correspondent and a theater critic and has also written about the history of gardens.

Editorial Reviews

Mr. Fenton has already written four or five of the poems future anthologists will squabble over. Out of Danger has moments of Villon, and moments where Gilbert and Sullivan are trying to overthrow Queen Victoria.” —William Logan, The New York Times Book Review

“Ever since he precociously arrived on the scene in the early 1970s, barely 20, Fenton has had a voice— a range of voices, a good pair of ears, an alert and often disconcerting knack of suddenly doing something different...Fenton has few imitators. He is sui generis, veering in [this] book from the most naked, exposed love lyrics (look at 'Serious,' 'Out of Danger') to hypnotic, cunningly crazy flights of rhetoric ('Out of the East,' 'The Ballad of the Imam and the Shah'). I feel that Fenton, with each impulse towards a new poem, has to make it new. He listens attentively to the voices in his head and, when the moment comes, it comes. And the whole dazzling performance works because the craft, the techniques have been tuned and turned and made ready. This is a wonderful book.” —Anthony Thwaite, The Sunday Telegraph (London)

“Here is a strong, fresh, pleasant wind blowing away the convoluted miasmas of most of his contemporaries, and the wind carries much clearer, cleaner, more complex and intensely memorable messages than the miasmas do.” —Hilary Corke, The Spectator

From the Publisher

A poet-journalist may seem an unlikely combination, since in America the callings have become professions. But Fenton ( All the Wrong Places ), an Englishman, shows what can be done in both when talent and intelligence mingle with an independent spirit. Out of Danger shows that he is among the most interesting and original poets going. He deserves a wide readership in the U.S., not least because of his work's humor, topicality and lilt. Cleverness abounds, but Fenton is smartest in the artistic choices that enable him to movingly treat worldly matters in oblique, seemingly offhand ways. ``Out of the East,'' his central section, is conceived as a series of songs for musical theater on such unlikely subjects as the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Chinese government's crackdown at Tiananmen Square. One of these, ``Cut-Throat Christ,'' is a Kiplingesque masterpiece combining the Manila underworld with Christian gospel. The final poem, ``Manila Manifesto,'' may not win Fenton friends here because of its sarcasm about American literary politics, but it is a funny, dead-on polemic: ``Paint like the Flemish! / Give weight to the blemish! / Down with a cautious imperfection! / Down with a bloodless circumspection!'' Fenton follows his own advice. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly