Fenton is as clever and ingenious as anyone around, but he is alone among his contemporaries in having a great deal to write about. He has all the civil virtues, the wit, the technical cunning, the seductive fluency but he has subordinated them to something much larger and more powerful; a vision of recent history, and his own personal place in it, that is at once intellectually demanding, morally and politically complex, wide in its human sympathies, and shot through with a sane and sober humour. Fenton's poems have a very high relative density….

[The] poems in "The Memory of War" date back as far as his student days at Oxford…. His work then was sprightly, cultivated, domestic; thoroughly Oxonian in manner, even down to its nervous brushes with International Socialism. A jaunty air of fun-over-the-teacakes clings to Fenton's early poems…. Fenton was entertainingly tough on the notion that poetry had any pressing business with madness and despair; certainly his own verse at the time, with its nursery and suburban references, its elegant metrics, was far too well-bred to flirt with such extremities.

Yet, ironically, his poetry really came alive after he had himself gone to an historical extremity…. He left literary London to set up house in Cambodia. Journalism paid his fare (I assume), but Fenton apparently lived through that war more as a local inhabitant than as a foreign correspondent. His Cambodian poems, at least, have no truck with the shallow detachment of reportage. They are resonant with articulate bewilderment and sorrow—not "war poems" so much as poems that find, in the particular savaged landscape of Cambodia, sufficient pain, destruction and loss to make themselves at home. The gentle lullaby rhythms of "In a Notebook", with its lovely colouring-in of domestic life in Fenton's riverbank village, suddenly stiffen in the last stanza…. The poem's raw material is an enormity. Fenton's response is to honour it with all the technical finesse at his command—with metrical poise, an unruffled verbal exactness, the care of the instinctive miniaturist….

With its rapidly shifting locations and its large family of characters, "A German Requiem" creates the illusion of extraordinary space and inclusiveness within a very tight form. In fewer than 80 lines, Fenton manages to build something that feels cathedral-like, vaulted, tall, full of echoes and dark cloisters of implication.

Much of Fenton's strength comes from this ability to conjure what is tacit and make it fill the spaces between the lines. His longer poems are collages of crystallised detail, stories in solution. Each poem is like a Henry James novella recast as a puzzle, with only the most shimmering incidents left standing. The pleasure is that, like all good puzzles, they do eventually unravel: on second or third reading, everything suddenly slides into sharp focus….

The glancing, elegantly fractured form that Fenton's poems take, with their ellipses and sudden electric connections, answers to a view of life that is stylish, wary, provisional, always intelligent, never breast-beating.