Fenton works for the front half of the New Statesman, and is said by the blurb to be a member of International Socialism. He has kept this from the part of him that writes poems; Terminal Moraine is uncommitted and affable…. On the evidence of a poem like "The Kingfisher's Boxing Gloves", Mr Fenton seems to be a cross between a Parisian dandy and the heavyweight champion of Oxford. This poem has been praised in another paper for its obscurity. The poet notes for us that it has come "from the French." It has in fact been rendered from Mr Fenton's French: the poem was written in that language and then brought back to English. Brilliant? Fatuous? The fatuousness of brilliance? I'm not sure which. There can be no doubt, however, about the poem's pleasing accuracies…. (pp. 59-60)

More satisfying is "The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford", a poem about "the fabled lands where myths / Go when they die …" or "this boxroom of the forgotten or hardly possible." Fenton uses the grotesque or strange exhibits—a musical whip, a dowser's twig—as catalysts to his sense of humour; but the poem transforms the museum and its chaotic piles of souvenirs into a darker place—where "The lonely and unpopular / Might find the landscapes of their childhood marked out…." The moral drama which a reader might experience in the poem—partly the result of cadence as well as imagery—is taken a step further:

                         Go
       In groups to giggle at curious finds.
       But do not step into the kingdom of your promises
       To yourself, like a child entering the forbidden
       Woods of his lonely playtime:

That simile is used with mastery. It brings all the atmosphere built up throughout the poem suddenly to bear on the poem's true subject—self-delusion through imagination. A poem of this length on that theme would work hard to avoid being a moral tract. At an early age, Fenton already knows how to handle the standard but always difficult moral subjects with originality.

Fenton is clearly "influenced" by Auden, especially later Auden. Easily identifiable Auden touches can be seen in "Pitt-Rivers Museum"—rhythm, syntax, and, in "South Parks Road", the shape of the stanza as well as some of its details…. He has immense potential, but the "Open Letter to Richard Crossman" in shaky ottava rima is an ominous sign; his talent seems to me the kind that could be swindled out of fulfilment by too much journalism, of which light verse can be a part. His effort to sound genial and wise makes him sound a thousand years old; and his displays of erudition, the cultural glee with which he seizes the recherché or historical, remove him almost as far as it is possible to go from the kind of subject he deals with interestingly in the New Statesman. But what he has written so far is enough to make Terminal Moraine one of the most interesting débuts for many years. (p. 60)