The quarrel isn’t often with the poems, though it can be; the quarrel often seems to be with Fenton as a purveyor of his own extravagant gifts as a poet. Because Fenton is always likely to be excising parts of his canon in ways that can seem supremely irritating to his many deep admirers. In this book, we lose poems from the last Penguin Selected which appeared in 2006; though I’m tempted to suggest that the poems that Fenton has withdrawn between books were not his best, anyway. Of which more below. Fortunately, some one at Faber, perhaps Paul Keegan himself, has got Fenton to see some sense and restore to this book such major works as ‘The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford’ and the wonderful ‘Staffordshire Murderer’. But we have to note that the subtitle of this volume is ‘Poems 1968 -2011’ and not ‘Selected Poems 1968 -2011’.
Fenton’s career has followed a trajectory that’s been both touched with fairy dust but also closely aligned with the zeitgeist. He has accessed the ‘glittering prizes’ with consummate ease from the very beginning. He won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford with the sonnet sequence ‘Our Western Furniture’, which examines Commander Parry’s visit to Japan at the end of the Edo period. And this piece signalled the major direction in Fenton’s work, that of the political poem, and more particularly the political pastoral. The political pastoral was carried over into a poem such as ‘The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford’ which, although purporting to be a catalogue of the eccentric collection at the eponymous museum, is actually an acute dissection of colonialization, and its rapacities. And Fenton’s political world changed direction when he went to Vietnam and Cambodia to report the Vietnam war. From this experience emerged such pieces as ‘Dead Soldiers’ which describes a meal taken with the Cambodian Prince Sihanouk. But also such fine poems as ‘Chosun’ about Korea, which is, again, inexplicably absent from this book.
From that experience, and his witnessing of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fenton created two of the major poems in late twentieth century British poetry, ‘The Memory of War’ and ‘Children in Exile’. ‘The Memory of War’, in particular, with its delicate reportage and sweet empathies with the victims of war, remains one of the great memorials to the devastation wrought in Europe as a result of both the Second World War and the Cold War.
That empathy with humanity is played out in the poems collected in the pamphlet Vacant Possession, the title poem of which is, again fortunately, returned to Fenton’s readers in this volume. Vacant Possession was Fenton’s brief contribution to the Motion/Morrison school of narrative poetry of the end the seventies and beginning of the eighties. But Fenton’s narratives of this period are not the story-telling of Motion’s kind, but are a deft bricolage of places and landscapes which touch a psychological depth and verity that Motion can only hint at. This narrative aspect to Fenton’s work reached it’s apogee in ‘A Staffordshire Murderer’, another political pastoral where Fenton riffs with great imagination and wit on the idea of the pottery ‘murderers’ produced by the Staffordshire potteries as mantelpiece ornaments in the middle of the nineteenth century.
That wit and lightness of touch has been part of Fenton’s technical armoury from the beginning, and he has always had a great reputation as a light-versifier. Latterly, that light verse has some what taken over his output. Not that the light verse format has stopped him producing serious work such as ‘Tiananmen’ about the notorious crushing of dissent in China and ‘The Ballad of the Imam and the Shah’ about Iran. Here, Fenton uses the forms and refrains of popular song to contain his biting ironies and satire. In ‘Jerusalem’, he uses the form of Milton’s ‘On the morning of Christ’s Nativity’. So, as a formalist, Fenton seems to be able to turn his hand to anything. But the light verse is what has contained his more recent love poetry, and this is where his admirers become, I would suggest, a little more concerned. The love poems are slightly broad brush, almost blokey! Fenton has always sought to keep his feet very firmly on the ground amidst all the fairy dust and glittering prizes, but the blokeishness can sometimes make these poems a little one-dimensional and etiolated. Some of these are the poems which have disappeared since the previous ‘Selected’ And the wonderful sense of syntax and sentence structure, so present in the earlier work is starkly absent from many of these pieces.
Where his concern for structure seems to score is in the elegy; the lovely ‘Memorial’ commissioned by the BBC to honour war correspondents world wide, and ‘At the Kerb’ an elegy for Mick Imlah. In these pieces, forms contain emotion in powerful and poignant ways.
At the end of this book is ‘Cosmology’, a limber, free-verse piece in which Fenton’s abundant imagination plays around with the biggest questions. In this poem, Fenton returns to that mellifluous warmth which characterises his very best work; ‘We have marked the first lands to be beggared by tillage/And the epoch when sheep first yielded wool,/We can question the composition of a tooth,’/We can fix the age of a splinter.’/We are renowned for our superb equations’.
Ian Pople