Newman 1167.

The Memory of War was the first full-length book published by my brother's Salamander Press. In the very first printing, the poem, Dead Soldiers, had a defective text, reflecting an early draft. An insert was printed giving the full version of the poem (as printed previously by the Sycamore Press). When setting up Salamander, my brother bought up the remainder stock of Terminal Moraine and soon sold it off at a profit. This money went into the production of The Memory of War. Some of the poems in Terminal Moraine were included in that edition, other were dropped. I looked back on some found poetry in old notebooks and printed some of this material for the first time under the title Exempla, together with poems incorporating or inspired by found material. All this (section IV of the book) was student work from Oxford days. The Memory of War began with A German Requiem, and went on to a section of recent poems, including those published in A Vacant Possession. This volume was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. -- JF


Arriving in Indochina in 1973 just as the American forces were withdrawing from Vietnam, Fenton witnessed the collapse of the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia and the Thieu regime in Saigon amid ongoing civil wars. Although his experiences here as a foreign correspondent later provided the material for the political poems which catapulted him into fame with the publication of The Memory of War (1982) (and his 1988 volume of reportage, All the Wrong Places), Fenton was unable to write poetry about Indochina at the time. It would have been different, he once commented, if it had been "one's own war." But to find a war just to write about it struck him as not only artificial but disgusting. The youthful prodigy had the material but the maturing poet needed to find the appropriate perspective.

In 1982, The Memory of War was published by Salamander Press to the most enthusiastic reception any young British poet had received since the appearance of Dylan Thomas. Almost immediately Fenton was hailed not only as one of the most accomplished poets of his generation but also as virtually unique, as Jonathan Raban stated in the Sunday Times, "in having a great deal to write about." Fenton's combination of technical skill and political insights appealed to a critical establishment, which saw contemporary poetry as increasingly marginal in its relation to society. His political poetry was compared to the work of Auden, Yeats, Brodsky, and Akhamatova, and he was praised for bringing the prose virtues of clarity, accessibility, and directness successfully into poetry.