When it first arrived, this Selected Poems gave me a shock. I glanced at the table of contents and could not believe my eyes. Later, returning to the book, I looked again, convinced that I must have made a mistake. But no, the mistake was not mine. James Fenton’s Selected Poems does not include ‘A Staffordshire Murderer’. I still find that proposition incredible, that Fenton really has excluded what is not just his best poem (it is that by a distance) but also one of the very few poems written by an Englishman since 1970 which one could call ‘great’:

Fear turns the ignition. The van is unlocked.
You may learn now what you ought to know:
That every journey begins with a death,
That the suicide travels alone, that the murderer needs company.

And the Staffordshire murderers, nervous though they are,
Are masters of the conciliatory smile.
A cigarette? A tablet in a tin?
Would you care for a boiled sweet from the famous poisoner

Of Rugeley? These are his own brand.
He has had never had any complaints.
He speaks of his victims as a sexual braggart
With a tradesman’s emphasis on the word ‘satisfaction’.

The sinister twists of this evergreen brilliancy are, thankfully, preserved in The Memory of War and Children in Exile, a collection which brought together the poems Fenton wrote between 1968 and 1983. While a few of these good early poems are retained in the Selected Poems (‘A German Requiem’, ‘Dead Soldiers’ and ‘The Skip’) quite a few of the best ones are not (‘Nest of Vampires’, ‘A Vacant Possession’ and ‘The Kingfisher’s Boxing-Gloves’.) After p. 38 it’s all downhill as we are presented with the bulk of what Fenton wrote after 1983 (readers who want to see what Fenton was like at his best should seek out the earlier book.)
The later poems, written in regular, ballad-like forms, often tackle conflict (Cambodia, Tiananmen, Jerusalem) and tend to be black-and-white expressions of sentiments with which few Western readers would disagree:

The cruel men
Are old and deaf
Ready to kill
But short of breath
And they will die
Like other men
And they’ll lie in state
In Tiananmen.

Elsewhere, Fenton tries his hand at humorous squibs and fey love lyrics, although whatever the subject-matter, the overwhelmingly arch treatment, tends to make the ‘serious’ and ‘light’ poems blur into each other. At a glance, Fenton’s late style may seem bracingly direct and simple but the odd result, in the war-poems and others, is to remove us from the conflicts and situations about which he writes. One finds oneself looking at the title of the poem to remember which war Fenton is in. Because the poems usually present Fenton as a wise secular liberal everyman to whom no one will listen, they tend to patronise their subjects, and, because the rhetoric leaves little room for shading, all the places, characters, and atmospheres get worked over in the same flat way. A typical example of this effect is ‘Out of the East’, where the speaker is a kind of aggregate soldier who speaks as though he had just been reading the poems of Harold Pinter:

A foreign soldier came to me
And he gave me a gun
And the liar spoke of victory
Before the year was done.

Although rhythmically various, the late poetry is emotionally predictable. When we read an opening like “It’s something you say at your peril./ It’s something you should contain” or “There’s a girl with a fist full of fingers/ There’s a man with a fist full of fivers” or “There’s a mynah bird a-squawking/ In the ipil-ipil tree”, we know roughly what emotional terrain we are in, we know roughly how that terrain is going to be covered and we know that we are not going to move out of it. One could almost express it as a formula:

There’s an ab in the cd,
there’s an ef in the g,
the hij and klm
may n, may o, may p,
but the qrs of the tuv
is the wx
yz.

Fenton’s late style puts me in mind of two Frys: one, the actor, Stephen, who,  like Fenton, has recently produced a book about writing poetry and who, like Fenton, seems to have found his spiritual home in the smoking-room limerick; the other, the verse-dramatist, Christopher, about whom Randall Jarrell, in the course of his Auden lectures, once wrote:

… [his] very scansion manages to sound insincere. I truly don’t understand how even the rhythm of his line can give that wonderful effect of pretentious, rhetorical, inconsequential virtuosity, of always just fooling around, of never even concernedly meaning business.

This sort of criticism could usefully be applied to a poem like Fenton’s ‘I Saw a Child’. The poem’s speaker addresses a tragic subject, yet by his manner contrives to sound annoyingly theatrical:

I saw a child with silver hair.
Stick with me and I’ll take you there.
Clutch my hand.
Don’t let go.
The fields are mined and the wind blows cold.
The wind blows through his silver hair.

Early in his career, Fenton looked like he might be a legitimate heir of Auden, in the way of such great American poets as Ashbery, Merrill, and Schuyler — indeed, at one point, Fenton looked like being the unofficial English branch of the New York School. But the moment passed. While Ashbery, Merrill, and Schuyler reinvented Auden — and themselves — in a number of surprising and delightful ways, Fenton got stuck. What he stuck his readers with, in turn, was a twee fossil, a kind of Anglo-American showbiz Esperanto, comprising one part Auden, nine parts Andrew Lloyd Webber. The final two lines of this Selected Poems are, “Never let me see you suffer baby/ Or I’ll flit the nest!” — a peculiar note on which to end — although it seems only right that the book’s last exclamation mark should sprout, like everything Fenton has published since 1983, so many question-marks.

James Fenton, Selected Poems, Penguin, 2006. £8.99. 978-0-141024-41-7

© John Redmond, 2006

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.