James Fenton is a brilliant poet of great technical virtuosity. His poetry is plunged in the real life of the kind that we see on television screens, read about in the newspapers, and (a happy few) discuss at High Tables. In the first two sections of [Children in Exile: Poems 1965–1984] there are poems about recollections of the bombing of Germany in 1944 and 1945, about Vietnamese refugees haunted by terrible memories of their bombings, about his own experiences as a political journalist visiting Vietnam in 1972–73. After these poems of great immediacy, there are poems in the manner of Auden's poetry of psychoanalytic parables mixed with an ominous sense of the neurotic forces moving thorugh contemporary history. In this section Fenton, like Auden, seems to be drawing strongly on memories of his own Anglican upbringing in Yorkshire….

In this phase of Fenton's poetry, as with Auden's in the 1930s, one feels, at one and the same time, that the poet has created within the poem a mysterious world with mysterious laws which work by their own logic, and yet also that there is a need of some ideology or system of belief which would make everything clear. One feels, too, that there are occasional references to some private area of the poet's life—perhaps to childhood memories—which are withheld from the reader. The feeling of Auden in some of these poems is so strong that it seems more like identification with his work than imitation of it. But because Fenton, as it were, takes over Auden, it also becomes Fenton's own world….

Some of Fenton's greatest successes belong to this section of the book—the evocative poem "Wind" and the wonderfully sustained "Chosun," a poem about the relationship of an elaborate mythology or theology to the lives of Koreans. This, incidentally, is an example of one aspect of Fenton's poetry: that it is packed with information, anthropological, scientific, and political. Fenton is also obsessed with vocabularies, particularly the scientific, which in his fifth section, called "Exempla," he turns into a kind of elaborate parody of scientific definitions—serious parody, if you like, because he shows how admirable, if absurd, they are…. (p. 31)

I want to emphasize the lightness, fun, and gaiety of some of Fenton's work, because without the wit, his most serious poems might seem weighed down by their subject matter, which is intensely political—not so much in being partisan or ideological, as in being saturated in the terribilita of the contemporary political world scene. Here he cetainly parts company with Auden, for Auden renounced the whole connection of his poetry with the world produced by politics. He did so, I think … because he thought that it was indecent for the inner dream worlds created by poetic imagination to take as subject matter the outer world of a nightmare reality which results from modern power politics….

Fenton, I am sure, is fully aware of these objections to writing poetry about the horrors which fill newspapers and television screens. It is no reflection on him to say that he comes to the reader armed with credentials and a deliberate strategy. The credentials are that he has been involved as a journalist in the places he is writing about. And he is honest in writing poetry in which the poet is journalist, reporter—simply that, and not one who parades his poetic heart on his sleeve….

In these war poems Fenton does not adopt a poetic persona, but that of someone whom he is addressing who is not a poet but who may be taken to share Fenton's view about the matters discussed. The most successful poem in the book is that which provides its title, "Children in Exile." This is dedicated to friends of his living in the Italian countryside near Florence—an American publisher and his wife—who have adopted a Cambodian family with its four children, rescued from being the victims of Pol Pot….

The real horror of Cambodia is filtered through the realistic dreams of the children who have been saturated in that horror. In "A German Requiem," a sequence of poems about a bombed German town, or towns, Fenton writes about the inability of the people living there to remember the horrors. Forgetting becomes a kind of diminution and magnification of them, both at the same time. (p. 32)

Here Fenton's strategy for imagining our terrible contemporary realities in poetry is rather like that of a photographer who photographs a scene, placing two or three filters across the lens in order to concentrate the scene by giving it some hallucinatory quality.

In several of these poems, Fenton is, then, clearly political. Clearly, too, he is not detached. He has political sympathies. In his poems about Germany and Cambodia, one feels these sympathies—liberal and socialist, I should guess—but at the same time a kind of absence of any ideology where, with Brecht, there would be communism, with Auden, Christianity. That there is this absence, especially of communism, probably throws some light on our time. Surely in the 1930s. Fenton would have been writing the kind of poetry that John Cornford (or even Auden) attempted to write, about the Marxist historical-materialist interpretation of contemporary history. One feels that in the end—perhaps because it has become impossible for someone like him to hold such a belief today—Fenton is driven back onto his own humanity. (pp. 32-3)