There are three poetic Fentons, two of comparatively minor interest. One offers botanical, psychological or medical "exempla" taken from books or other printed work as poems, rather in the whimsical manner of the surrealists exhibiting "found objects" as art. Another produces light verse that is always lively, sometimes funny, and often marked by a deadly topicality…. The third Fenton, however, has fulfilled what "Our Western Furniture" promised, in a dozen magnificent poems. It is notable that almost all of them have their origins in his Cambodian and German experiences.

The title poem of ["Children in Exile"] is one of them. In elegant, almost casual four-line stanzas Fenton tells the story of four child refugees from Pol Pot's Cambodia….

"Children in Exile" is not exactly a narrative poem, but it "tells a story" in a way that is so unfashionable to-day as to be called bold. The directness and simplicity of speech, the rhetoric firmly under control, are necessary to the story's telling, but Fenton has other styles equally effective, like the linked prose passages of despair and destruction in "Lines for Translation into Any Language" or the unstressed symbolism of "Wind"….

"Dead Soldiers" and "In a Notebook", with its various images of peace destroyed by war … are particularly fine. In such poems Fenton fulfils what the socially conscious poets of the Thirties intended but hardly ever achieved. They wanted to write about war but not to experience it, and ended up producing poems chiefly about their own feelings. Fenton's work, ironic, elegant, aware of yet always a little detached from the suffering it deals with, is the truest social poetry of our time.