Out of Danger

by Fenton, James

• ISBN13: 9780374524371
• ISBN10: 0374524378
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-04-01
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux

Summary

Out of Danger is James 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 Children in Exile an unusually distinctive and distinguished book. The poems in the new 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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Beauty, Danger and Dismay	p. 3
Out of Danger	p. 4
Serious	p. 5
The Ideal	p. 6
Hinterhof	p. 7
The Possibility	p. 8
The Mistake	p. 9
I'll Explain	p. 11
In Paris with You	p. 12
The Milkfish Gatherers	p. 14
Jerusalem	p. 18
For Andrew Wood	p. 22
Out of the East	p. 27
Blood and Lead	p. 34
The Ballad of the Imam and the Shah	p. 35
I Saw a Child	p. 39
Tiananmen	p. 41
The Ballad of the Shrieking Man	p. 43
Fireflies of the Sea	p. 48
Cut-Throat Christ	p. 50
Gabriel	p. 55
The Ballad of the Birds	p. 57
I Know What I'm Missing	p. 61
Bruisers and Dreamers	p. 63
Here Come the Drum Majorettes!	p. 65
The Orange Dove of Fiji	p. 71
The Journey	p. 73
On a Recent Indiscretion by a Certain Fulbright Fellow in Upper Egypt	p. 75
Maski Papaano	p. 77
The Manila Manifesto	p. 81
Notes	p. 104
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