Selected Poems

"There’s an awful lot of very good reportage and academic books about Southeast Asia and Indochina, particularly during the 60s, 70s and 80s, when there was so much conflict going on. For the generation before mine, it was the defining story. Fenton was a journalist in Cambodia before Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, and then moved to Saigon, where he famously rode the first North Vietnamese tank to reach the Presidential Palace. What is so good about Fenton’s poetry is that he somehow manages to distil the real essence of being a frontline war correspondent, and what the refugee camps were like, and how ironic it is that the Americans bombed Cambodia and helped the Khmer Rouge come to power by destroying the country. Fenton has condensed all that into beautiful lines of verse, and it’s a nice way to read about the heartbreaking ironies of what took place in Indochina [today known as Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar]. His poem ‘Lines for Translation into any Language’ is about what happens to ordinary people when a society is convulsed by violence. It could apply to Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979, or to parts of Cambodia in the early 1990s before the UN went in, to Bangladesh in 1971 or to post-earthquake Haiti. As a foreign correspondent, it is sometimes heartbreaking to be compelled to write in muted English about, say, 123 people suffocating in a fire, whereas this poem conveys things that a news bulletin cannot."