Even in peacetime, many women find themselves isolated in a wartime
of their own when their loved ones are involved in conflicts
overseas. As mothers or wives they live in a state of separation,
from husbands, sons or daughters in permanent danger - or so they
feel - as well as from an often alienating everyday world of people
who have no idea of what anxieties and fears grip them every
minute. They also find themselves switching back and forth between
two time zones, between the present moment and what might have been
happening several hours ago in the Middle East. Home Front presents
the poetry of four such women, Bryony Doran and Isabel Palmer, both
mothers of young British soldiers serving in Afghanistan; and two
American poets, Jehanne Dubrow, wife of a serving US naval officer
deployed to the Persian Gulf and other conflict zones, and Elyse
Fenton, wife of a US army medic posted to Iraq. It brings together
four full-length collections by these writers; those by the two
British poets are debut collections first published in full in this
book. The poems in Bryony Doran's Bulletproof tell a chronological
story, from her son's unexpected decision to join the army through
his tours in and returns from Afghanistan. Covering every emotion
from fear to fury, yet lifted by humour and details of everyday
domestic life, these are poems written to preserve a pacifist
mother's sanity as each day plays itself out. They show her coping
with The News, her fantasies, his short spells of home leave, and
her realisation that both are imprisoned in a modern myth. The
narrative in Isabel Palmer's Atmospherics begins with seeing her
only son go to war in Afghanistan soon after his 21st birthday in
2011 and ends with his final, safe return in 2015. His role there
was to lead foot patrols and to operate machines for detecting
improvised explosive devices. While he was on tour, she wrote one
poem every week reflecting on their experiences. The earlier poems
appeared in Ground Signs (Flarestack Poets, 2014), a Poetry Book
Society Pamphlet Choice. Driven by intellectual curiosity and
emotional exploration, the poems in Jehanne Dubrow's Stateside
(2010) are remarkable for their subtlety, sensual imagery and
technical control. The speaker attempts to understand her own life
through the long history of military wives left to wait and wonder,
invoking Penelope's plight in Homer's Odyssey as a model but also
as a source of mystery. Dubrow is fearless in her contemplation of
the far-reaching effects of war but even more so in her excavation
of a marriage under duress. At times quiet, at others cacophonous,
the poems of Elyse Fenton's Clamor turn a lyric lens on the
language we use to talk about war and atrocity, and the
irreconcilable rifts - between lover and beloved, word and thing -
such work unearths. Originally published in the US - but not in the
UK - in 2010, Clamor was the first book of poetry to win Britain's
Dylan Thomas Prize.
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