[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...