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Clamor
Poetry. Winner the 2010 University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize. Winner of the 2009 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize Selected by D. A. Powell. Written in part while Fenton's husband was deployed as a medic in Baghdad, CLAMOR loosely follows the narrative arc of weeks breathlessly suspended between word or silence, return or tragedy, heartbreak or gratitude. Yet these are poems that refuse to be sentimental or didactic. Instead, they marry with lyric ferocity the personal and the political in an examination of language and love in 21st century wartime.
77 pages, Paperback
First published March 31, 2010
About the author
Elyse Fenton
5 books6 followersElyse Fenton is the author of Clamor (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010), selected by D.A. Powell as winner of the 2009 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Winner of the 2008 Pablo Neruda Award from Nimrod International Literary Journal, her poetry and nonfiction have also appeared in American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Bat City Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The New York Times. In 2010, she received the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize for Clamor.
Born and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, Elyse Fenton received her B.A. from Reed College and her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. She has worked in the woods, on farms, and in schools in New England, the Pacific Northwest, Mongolia, and Texas.
Born and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, Elyse Fenton received her B.A. from Reed College and her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. She has worked in the woods, on farms, and in schools in New England, the Pacific Northwest, Mongolia, and Texas.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 1, 2012
This collection of poetry was an impressive surprise. I purchased it to support the author, whom I haven't met but who is married to a college classmate of my son's. I am reviewing it, however, because it is remarkable writing and deserves its recent awarding of the prestigious Dylan Thomas prize.
The inspiration for the book is the author's husband's deployment, tenure, and subsequent return from Iraq, and her talent is such that she sweeps us into her vivid imagination as she conjures images of what he might be going through or feeling and what she, in her day-to-day waiting, is enduring. Her choice of words is exquisitely artistic yet powerful and effective. Beginning with the title word, CLAMOR, she opens the book with its dictionary definition:
1. a: A noisy shouting b: a loud continuous noise
2. Insistent public expression (as or support or protest)
3. SILENCE
In this, she sets the tone for the wide-ranging reactions to and emotions about war, not only from the perspective of a soldier's spouse but also from the perspective of society.
Her juxtaposition of unlikely images is jarring and powerful. In the poem "The Riots in Bangladore," for instance, notice the use of the words "grief," "naked scaffolding," and "blossoms" (line spacing as in the poem):
"...Even now, as grief threatens to strip the world down to its naked
scaffolding--the war entering a third year, you still nine months
from home--blossoms swarm my window and the sun
impulsively flashes, bare flesh beneath a shredded veil."
In the poem "Planting, Hayhurst Farm," I found the linkage of planting seedlings and planting bodies to be fascinating, honest, and searingly poignant.
Ms. Fenton is a keen observer. Sprinkled throughout this collection are images that I found breathtakingly vivid. Anyone who has explored or gone fishing in a country stream will recognize the following, but the author has captured it with an amazing combination of well-chosen words:
"There was sun and slough.
There was shin-deep in the quick waters
and places where mayflies' wing drag
filigreed the air, where my own hook-flash
wracked the mud-skinned surface
and a hundred violent mouths rose up to feed."
In winter, she writes:
"Ice cauls our windows. Snow
paraffins the trees."
In reflecting on the occasional awkwardness of a phone call from her husband from the war zone, she writes,
"...and when he said nothing she knew every silence was a lie he couldn't tell."
About working in her garden,
"...May evening
and the sun's bayoneted on a paintless post
across the yard--enough to blind us with..."
Contemporary poetry is not a genre I typically enjoy, but I will definitely be looking for more of it and for more from this author.
The inspiration for the book is the author's husband's deployment, tenure, and subsequent return from Iraq, and her talent is such that she sweeps us into her vivid imagination as she conjures images of what he might be going through or feeling and what she, in her day-to-day waiting, is enduring. Her choice of words is exquisitely artistic yet powerful and effective. Beginning with the title word, CLAMOR, she opens the book with its dictionary definition:
1. a: A noisy shouting b: a loud continuous noise
2. Insistent public expression (as or support or protest)
3. SILENCE
In this, she sets the tone for the wide-ranging reactions to and emotions about war, not only from the perspective of a soldier's spouse but also from the perspective of society.
Her juxtaposition of unlikely images is jarring and powerful. In the poem "The Riots in Bangladore," for instance, notice the use of the words "grief," "naked scaffolding," and "blossoms" (line spacing as in the poem):
"...Even now, as grief threatens to strip the world down to its naked
scaffolding--the war entering a third year, you still nine months
from home--blossoms swarm my window and the sun
impulsively flashes, bare flesh beneath a shredded veil."
In the poem "Planting, Hayhurst Farm," I found the linkage of planting seedlings and planting bodies to be fascinating, honest, and searingly poignant.
Ms. Fenton is a keen observer. Sprinkled throughout this collection are images that I found breathtakingly vivid. Anyone who has explored or gone fishing in a country stream will recognize the following, but the author has captured it with an amazing combination of well-chosen words:
"There was sun and slough.
There was shin-deep in the quick waters
and places where mayflies' wing drag
filigreed the air, where my own hook-flash
wracked the mud-skinned surface
and a hundred violent mouths rose up to feed."
In winter, she writes:
"Ice cauls our windows. Snow
paraffins the trees."
In reflecting on the occasional awkwardness of a phone call from her husband from the war zone, she writes,
"...and when he said nothing she knew every silence was a lie he couldn't tell."
About working in her garden,
"...May evening
and the sun's bayoneted on a paintless post
across the yard--enough to blind us with..."
Contemporary poetry is not a genre I typically enjoy, but I will definitely be looking for more of it and for more from this author.
August 26, 2010
I read this because it was on the long list for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2010. Phew. These poems are all related to a girl waiting for her love to come home from war, and then about the reality of life when he does (compared to the idealized version of what life will be when he comes home and everything is perfect). Incredibly powerful, very raw, painfully honest. I hope this makes it to the shortlist.
March 20, 2025
war is sad
January 19, 2011
My review from Elevate Difference. http://elevatedifference.com/review/c...
Elyse Fenton’s first book of poems, Clamor, features some of the finest contemporary poetry on war. She captures both the battlefield and the homefront with an unwavering realism. Her imagery is fresh and her language rich.
Fenton opens her book with a definition of the word “clamor” which is quite striking. Laid side-by-side the three definitions—a noisy shouting, insistent public expression, and silence—are not only surprising to the reader, but also instantly establish the tone of the collection. These poems are about the chaos surrounding contradiction, expression, love and silence.
“Gratitude,” the first poem in Clamor, captures the aforementioned themes with perfectly selected diction and unsettling images. “Wreckage was still smoldering on the airport road / when they delivered that soldier—beyond recognition,” and “And I love you more for holding the last good flesh/of that soldier’s cock in your hands, for startling his warm blood/back to life,” are lines that depict the mix of the macabre and the emotion that those in, or dealing with, war witness. The soldiers and their loved ones back home are forced to live in “that moment just before we think/the end will never come and then/the moment when it does.”
One of the best lines in the collection is in “Your Plane Arrives from Iraq for the Last Time.” In this piece, the speaker is hypersensitive to the ongoings of objects around him or her, which leads to some superb and original descriptions, including “caesura of rotors” and “the road toward post/needle-pricked in brake lights.” The poem ends with: “And at the end/of the longest sentence I’ve ever known/your face in the window’s fogged aperture/stranded noun. Rorschach of stars. Beautiful thing.” With the paring down of the language in the phrase “beautiful thing” we are really given a sense of the speaker’s state of mind. After describing everything so vividly, we are left with a simple phrase that truly captures the speaker’s devotion and longing for the returning soldier.
Fenton’s use of language and mastery of craft dominant the entire collection and also helped her to win the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize, which was judged by D.A. Powell.
Anyone interested in war, particularly the invasion of Iraq, and its affect on those at home and overseas should pick up this collection. It is a testament to the passion and good that exists in this world, in spite of destruction.
Written by: Michelle Tooker, October 26th 2010
Elyse Fenton’s first book of poems, Clamor, features some of the finest contemporary poetry on war. She captures both the battlefield and the homefront with an unwavering realism. Her imagery is fresh and her language rich.
Fenton opens her book with a definition of the word “clamor” which is quite striking. Laid side-by-side the three definitions—a noisy shouting, insistent public expression, and silence—are not only surprising to the reader, but also instantly establish the tone of the collection. These poems are about the chaos surrounding contradiction, expression, love and silence.
“Gratitude,” the first poem in Clamor, captures the aforementioned themes with perfectly selected diction and unsettling images. “Wreckage was still smoldering on the airport road / when they delivered that soldier—beyond recognition,” and “And I love you more for holding the last good flesh/of that soldier’s cock in your hands, for startling his warm blood/back to life,” are lines that depict the mix of the macabre and the emotion that those in, or dealing with, war witness. The soldiers and their loved ones back home are forced to live in “that moment just before we think/the end will never come and then/the moment when it does.”
One of the best lines in the collection is in “Your Plane Arrives from Iraq for the Last Time.” In this piece, the speaker is hypersensitive to the ongoings of objects around him or her, which leads to some superb and original descriptions, including “caesura of rotors” and “the road toward post/needle-pricked in brake lights.” The poem ends with: “And at the end/of the longest sentence I’ve ever known/your face in the window’s fogged aperture/stranded noun. Rorschach of stars. Beautiful thing.” With the paring down of the language in the phrase “beautiful thing” we are really given a sense of the speaker’s state of mind. After describing everything so vividly, we are left with a simple phrase that truly captures the speaker’s devotion and longing for the returning soldier.
Fenton’s use of language and mastery of craft dominant the entire collection and also helped her to win the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize, which was judged by D.A. Powell.
Anyone interested in war, particularly the invasion of Iraq, and its affect on those at home and overseas should pick up this collection. It is a testament to the passion and good that exists in this world, in spite of destruction.
Written by: Michelle Tooker, October 26th 2010
February 8, 2011
I am a devotee of poetry read out loud by its author, and that is how I have fallen in love before, and that is how I fell in love with Elyse Fenton. Surely the pieces I heard, on the BBC, on NPR, on OPB -- when I called and spoke with her and found the discussion just like a poem's first rough draft, quiet and whole without quite saying the things you want to say -- were lovely and wracked with grief and death.
And this is perhaps the thing. The poems are all, all about death, and some of that death is of course metaphorical and ripped through with life but most of it is either real or imagined and expected. She loves her husband; her husband is at war; he wraps gauze around bodies. There is a noise in her head and a stillness in her heart, and this is clamor.
I loved many of the poems; I loved the images of seedlings and weedy belts and the gloved thumbs of leaves and Live Oak, Live Low Cumulus, Live Sun. I loved the crows throughout the book, tree-fulls, waking squawks, beggaring in fuselages. I loved the words: chthonic, pellicle, cenotaph, caesura, kerf, caul. She loves the words, too, using them like rosary beads, Rorschach, tongue, flesh, thigh, clamor. And everything is on fire.
But she is young; her hero comes back scathed only from re-entry; it is not as if he spent long hours battling other fleshy, bloody humans; so her best poems are not of her own fears and "infidelities" (dreaming, always, of the death of her husband -- and not of him coming home whole) and loneliness, of the terror of his days, but of the terror of others' days, the quiet of a day when he is returned. 'Persephone as a Model for the Soldier, Returned,' is almost right, almost what I love about her. But so often she reaches for the death-image and this somehow has me wrinkling my brow. What do you know of death!? I want to ask. (Not that I know.) But then: she sings slow and lovely in her poems about other people, about Live Oaks, about coffee.
She has a mastery of word and image that is precocious, surely; her poems are many-layered; she paints with myth and dictionary. She sometimes slips into the precious, the too-wide-eyed, the innocent. She is, indeed, innocent of all this war; but connected through this boy-soldier-husband's thread; this is an important voice but a shy and unseasoned one. I'll be interested to read her poems when she's 40.
And this is perhaps the thing. The poems are all, all about death, and some of that death is of course metaphorical and ripped through with life but most of it is either real or imagined and expected. She loves her husband; her husband is at war; he wraps gauze around bodies. There is a noise in her head and a stillness in her heart, and this is clamor.
I loved many of the poems; I loved the images of seedlings and weedy belts and the gloved thumbs of leaves and Live Oak, Live Low Cumulus, Live Sun. I loved the crows throughout the book, tree-fulls, waking squawks, beggaring in fuselages. I loved the words: chthonic, pellicle, cenotaph, caesura, kerf, caul. She loves the words, too, using them like rosary beads, Rorschach, tongue, flesh, thigh, clamor. And everything is on fire.
But she is young; her hero comes back scathed only from re-entry; it is not as if he spent long hours battling other fleshy, bloody humans; so her best poems are not of her own fears and "infidelities" (dreaming, always, of the death of her husband -- and not of him coming home whole) and loneliness, of the terror of his days, but of the terror of others' days, the quiet of a day when he is returned. 'Persephone as a Model for the Soldier, Returned,' is almost right, almost what I love about her. But so often she reaches for the death-image and this somehow has me wrinkling my brow. What do you know of death!? I want to ask. (Not that I know.) But then: she sings slow and lovely in her poems about other people, about Live Oaks, about coffee.
She has a mastery of word and image that is precocious, surely; her poems are many-layered; she paints with myth and dictionary. She sometimes slips into the precious, the too-wide-eyed, the innocent. She is, indeed, innocent of all this war; but connected through this boy-soldier-husband's thread; this is an important voice but a shy and unseasoned one. I'll be interested to read her poems when she's 40.
March 1, 2012
This book of poems is inspired by the deployment of Fenton’s husband, an army medic, to Iraq. The poems sweep across the experience from different perspectives: her day-to-day life without him, waiting for him to return to her, his tenure and experiences in Iraq imagined by her, the juxtaposition of their experiences, and his eventual return. As individuals, her poems are breathtaking snapshots. As a collection, they have this dramatic and cohesive narrative arc that I usually don’t notice in books of poetry.
From the introduction, when Fenton points out the definition of “clamor,” which paradoxically means both noise and silence, we appreciate Fenton’s infatuation with words and their endless meanings as she goes on to dissect and explore terms like ‘corkscrew landing’ and ‘friendly fire’ in unforgettable ways. She is an observer of the world in the most intimate way. Her word choices are exquisite, striking, and powerful. Her poems have this immediacy that somehow physically moves you to places you’ve never been and feelings you’ve never experienced.
All you want to do when you read Fenton’s poetry is speak the words aloud so that you can connect with them, experience them yourself, feel the sound on your tongue, the images that come to life with your voice. Try it yourself:
“And at the end
of the longest sentence I’ve ever known
your face in the window’s fogged aperture
stranded noun.
Rorschach of stars.
Beautiful thing”
“…By the time you arrived
there were already hands fluttering white flags of gauze
against the ruptured scaffolding of ribs, the glistening skull, and no skin
left untended…”
From the introduction, when Fenton points out the definition of “clamor,” which paradoxically means both noise and silence, we appreciate Fenton’s infatuation with words and their endless meanings as she goes on to dissect and explore terms like ‘corkscrew landing’ and ‘friendly fire’ in unforgettable ways. She is an observer of the world in the most intimate way. Her word choices are exquisite, striking, and powerful. Her poems have this immediacy that somehow physically moves you to places you’ve never been and feelings you’ve never experienced.
All you want to do when you read Fenton’s poetry is speak the words aloud so that you can connect with them, experience them yourself, feel the sound on your tongue, the images that come to life with your voice. Try it yourself:
“And at the end
of the longest sentence I’ve ever known
your face in the window’s fogged aperture
stranded noun.
Rorschach of stars.
Beautiful thing”
“…By the time you arrived
there were already hands fluttering white flags of gauze
against the ruptured scaffolding of ribs, the glistening skull, and no skin
left untended…”
July 24, 2014
Don't read or listen to interviews with Fenton before you read this book. Read the whole thing and just marvel. So. Effing. Good. And then find the interview she had on NPR (I think), sit down, and listen. You will think even harder about her words, about perspective, about imagination, about "reality." Isn't reading poetry great?!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 25, 2011
A worthy winner of the Dylan thomas prize, the poems are searching, relevant and comment on war with compassion and honesty.
June 3, 2013
Fenton presents war from the prospective of a soldier's wife.
September 21, 2015
Sometimes I unwisely forget that I need to read poetry. Clamor reminded me and satisfied the need for deeply felt human experience expressed in vivid, honest and personal words.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews