Children in Exile: Poems 1968-1984

by James Fenton

Fenton's work is elegant, highly finished, reticent, witty. Disturbing and deeply affecting, Children in Exile remains an exhilarating and memorable performance.

"Quite simply, Fenton's poems are frightening." - The New York Times Book Review

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 1994

About the author

James Fenton was born in Lincoln in 1949 and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. He has worked as political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondent, foreign correspondent and columnist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was Oxford Professor of Poetry for the period 1994-99. In 2007, Fenton was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Reviews

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

'The eye by which I see God
Is the same eye by which God sees me.'
- James Fenton, "Tauler" from Children in Exile



One real danger, both past and future
that comes with reading a selection of poems
covering 16 years of poetry production is
you begin by feeling awkward, reading heavy
verse about Pol Pot & refugees & famine
while casually eating a dozen Circus Animal
Cookies® (after swallowing a Vicodin®) in
a quickly cooling tub, so you carefully insert
a bookmark on page 55 (alert to the sym-
metry of reading 1/2 his poems wet 1/2 dry,
drain the tub, toss your empty diet Dr.
Pepper in the trash, leave a wet trail from
tile to carpet where you dry your butt &
prick & get your P-jammies on & soon you
discover the iced elephants you just ate --
that seemed so inappropriate in the
beginning -- now they are gone would
have (with the buzz of the Vicodin now)
perfected the playful poems near the End.

[Steve Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, another I'll keep by my side to dip into, I really enjoy this man's work

[Dominic H · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's fascinating reading this collection again after a gap of many years. Fenton was acclaimed when it was published, building on the buzz that the beautifully written (and produced) 'A Memory of War' started when it was published in the early 1980s. The frequently made comparison with Auden strikes me more vividly than ever now. He has Auden's lyric gift, command of form (see 'Letter to John Fuller' for a truly virtuoso example) and a similarly seemingly endless catalogue of disquieting images or taxonomies to hand, which Auden would absolutely have owned to. But there's more of course. What strikes me above all is an ability to centre verse around fragments or antithetical concepts. It's fundamental to how 'The Memory of War' works for example but runs as a creative thread throughout the collection.
I have stopped myself lamenting the lack of new poems from James Fenton for the last 20 years or so. We should be grateful for what he have and this volume is the best of him.

[Fraser Kinnear · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't connect with most of his poetry, in particular the experimental type stuff. But I do have a few fond favorites, including: "A Vacant Possession", "The Skip", "Letter to John Fuller" and "God, A Poem"

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

An all-time favourite. Evocative poems about everything from Pol Pot to a dusty ethnographic museum in Oxford.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth it for his poem (in limerick) about poet-suicides.

[Mills College Library]

821.914 F342c 1984

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great poems. Often funny, often moving.

Fuller review now on my blog here for the interested.