The impact of James Fenton's best poems comes from the surprise of encountering the unexpected within his otherwise careful formal strategies. This seeming contradiction is a two-edged sword, however, for in Fenton's poetry there is also a distance between the poet and the poem, which is created by artifice, and which robs his most accomplished verses of their effect.

The Memory of War begins with a sequence of poems titled 'A German Requiem'…. The poet is presented as the observer of decay, the chronicler of a process of fading. From this stance comes the poet's detachment, for though he is himself a builder, he is working in a style which has been subject to considerable decay; he uses this fact consciously in the echoes he evokes. It is a war with memory, as much as a memory of war.

This tradition which Fenton follows was once described by Donald Davie as being 'decadently subtle', tending to accept scenes or historical situations as givens. The poet fits experience into an accepted world-view, rather than forging his own outlook. Such verse is more at home with decay than exploration; each striking image stands out against a reflective background, in which the intuitive collides with the academic.

In 'Dead Soldiers', the spiritual centrepiece of this book, Fenton superbly portrays the insanity of war through the use of images that are chillingly out of place. But, as if to soften that assault on the reader, the poem is given an historical setting that makes the unique situation into an historical given. The poem is further distanced by the use of a journalist narrator whose detachment for the excesses of Prince Chantaraingsey renders further images anecdotal. The poem emerges with the quality of observations left to percolate on the back burner of the poet's imagination, where, steeped in his skill, they have slid, inevitably Hobbesian, into their own state of decay.

Some poems seek different solutions. 'A Vacant Possession' shows form following function in a stately decline … while 'The Skip' uses humour to cover similar ground more effectively. But the danger of distancing becomes more obvious in Fenton's nonsense verse; written with such detachment it resembles an exercise too easy to be taxing.

The best example of the problem comes in the section entitled 'Exempla', which includes a series of found poems, mostly unearthed in the Pitt-Rivers Museum. At first, it seemed a piece of formal daring: in a slim collection gathered over 14 years, the inclusion of a large number of found poems was a leap away from the formal constraints which appeared to be holding Fenton's energy back. But reading the found poems, one wonders eventually whether they too have been transformed into decay, or whether other events, like the war in Cambodia, have not been transformed into the poetic equivalent of index cards in the Pitt-Rivers. (pp. 25-6)

Fenton's poems are immaculately crafted, but the skill of 'The Fruit-Grower in Wartime' is, in the end, merely wry, and Fenton perhaps could be compared to one of his own found poems, 'What the Frog's Eye tells the Frog's Brain':

        He does remember a living
        Thing provided it stays within
        His field of vision and he is not distracted.

Poets of James Fenton's talents should be more distracted. (p. 26)