[In A Vacant Possession, Fenton's] starting point is Auden's statement: 'Present in every human being are two desires, a desire to know the truth about the primary world, the given world in which we are born, live, love, hate and die, and the desire to make new secondary worlds of our own or, if we cannot make them ourselves, to share in the secondary worlds of those who can.' Those who can, do; those who can't, leech. Fenton can. His fictional worlds impose themselves on us (and on him) as they might on the mind of a madman—which is why the poems are prefaced by an extract from Rasselas where the astronomer complains that he has suffered 'chimeras to prey upon me in secret'.

'Song', for instance, continues the nonsense mode of 'Lollipops of the Pomeranian Baroque' and 'The Kingfisher's Boxing Gloves' in his previous collection. It is a short humoresque that examines the night-life of slugs and spiders…. 'Song' is, however, distinguished from other nonsense poetry by the way in which it constantly flirts with meaning: we almost take it seriously because it almost takes itself seriously. The other poems, though very different in tone, are partly about the relationship of the purely imagined to the real. The last, 'In a Notebook', repeats the same description of a Vietnamese village during the war but offers two alternative endings, the first imagined, the second real. Here, the imagination is seen to be irresponsible. Elsewhere, it is compelling, inventive, a brilliant liar.

'Prison Island' is obviously a fiction, full of poignantly urgent political advice that has been superseded by time, yet delighting in its own dubious status. How can we be moved by the merely invented, it seems to ask. The text of the poem is a letter from a political prisoner on one of the Lipari islands off north Sicily to a friend on the mainland…. But if the poem is the letter, how can it include information about its fate after it was sent? This deliberately gives the fictional game away and allows Fenton his implicit question: how can we be troubled by a chimera?…

'A Vacant Possesion' begins once more with an empty house, but this time the poet is moving in, with bewildering imaginative speed. The furniture is, of course, purely mental, as the sudden time changes make clear…. Once again, though, we're convinced by the detail (a mixture of the ordinary and the bizarre) until our disbelief is quite suspended by Fenton's final trump: the narrator goes into his bedroom for something he's forgotten, then can't remember what it is. Given the poet's carte blanche to invent, what could be more convincing than this 'failure' to do so?