LC copy in dust jacket.

a book of light humorous verse

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.