[Fenton] projects force and conviction …, and has done so since his earliest poems appeared at the beginning of the Seventies. After 'Terminal Moraine' (1971), his poetic course has been chequered, but now he has swum into clear view with ["The Memory Of War"], a book made up of the strongest parts of his earlier work and several striking new poems of weight and length…. [It] is not too soon to hail his achievement and celebrate his voice.

What is he saying in his poems, or, put another way, what is the nature of the force inherent in his invention? The answer won't come pat. He is political in a sense, writing about war-devastated countries, such as Germany and Cambodia. He has taken over Auden's playful extensions of psychoanalysis and finds in social pictures maps of moral decrepitude ('The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford'). He is master of the palimpsest, putting bits of scholarly arcana together, which he calls here 'Exempla,' and making elaborate collages, such as 'Chosun,' a masterpiece built up from bizarre detail taken from a nineteenth-century book on Korea. He is always brilliant when he writes Nonsense Verse. Each poem in the section 'The Empire of the Senseless' is beautifully poised. His light verse, represented by 'Letter to John Fuller,' deflates hysteria in the wittiest of numbers. Then there are his Horatian, discursive poems, which create imaginary landscapes of exile and loss, as in 'Prison Island' and 'A Vacant Possession.'

Reading Fenton in toto makes you appreciate the enormous importance of the arbitrary in art. Even the most telling detail has to submit to the gift of the maker: he brings it to life by choosing it and giving it neighbourhood. Our minds respond to the lapidarist in him, to the pleasure of this piece going there, and this detail set against that other. We test it on our ear and our feelings. Fenton is a magician-materialist—he assembles, he juxtaposes, and he makes art out of his chosen matter as a witch-doctor fashions fetishes. His assemblages bring with them tragedy, comedy, love of the world's variety, and the sadness of its moral blight.