All five poems in James Fenton's A Vacant Possession show the expertise evident in his first collection, Terminal Moraine—but the mood is very different. There is a feeling of desolation, of loneliness and hurt, which is both moving and disturbing. Even the opening poem, "Song", the closest in spirit to Terminal Moraine, has an undertone of menace, and the path described in the final stanza offers little reassurance…. (p. 59)

It is the theme of friendship, with its obverse of loss and betrayal, which links these poems. Both the title poem and "Prison Island" depict situations haunted by unreality and inadequacy. "Nest of Vampires" suggests that even childhood, in retrospect, has forbidden mysteries whose solution could only be unpleasant. "In a Notebook" reinforces the twin trap of hollowness and encirclement implied in the pamphlet's title, by re-using lines from the first three stanzas to construct the fourth. The...