Poetry News
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019
Metcalf, Stephen.
“Informal Menace” Rev. of Selected Poems by James Fenton. New York Times Book Review 11
February 2007: 9.
Metcalf says right off that James
Fenton has overcome almost all the obstacles that have been thrown in his
path to prevent Fenton from living up to his promise
as "the major British poet of his generation." One such obstacle was
the epithet "heir to W. H. Auden." Another was "a turn on the throne" as
the Oxford professor of poetry." In spite of these and other "hindrances,"
Fenton has remained "an extraordinary poet with something original to disclose."
Unlike Auden, who was often obscure and prolific,
possessing "an enlarged sense of poetic vocation," Fenton is plain-spoken
and unprolific, possessing a "deflated" sense of poetic vocation. In his
early poems, such collections as The Memory of War (1982), he found
History in the guise of the war in southeast Asia, which resulted in a poetic
statement
that was informal but "frightening." In the deliberately flattened
language of a war correspondent setting his readers straight, these early poems
display the shattering reality of violence, but do so with a surface that
remains undisturbed, a surface in fact which is "a combination of prosodic
virtuosity and slangy, almost contemptuous, nonchalance." Children in
Exile, a later collection, brings Fenton's "developing gifts" together.
Here the title poem is fifty quatrains mingling free verse with rhymed
pentameter, and here Fenton seems to be leaving behind the climate of war
and corruption for a world of love and forgiveness. In many poems,
however, he remains detached emotionally from his subjects. In others such
as "For Andrew Wood," an elegy, he feels simply and directly. Like many
British poets today, he avoids Deep Ideas about Life and Poetry to compose
songs, many with refrains. Yet Selected Poems does contain the
libretto for an opera about a woman kidnapped by a cult, proof the Fenton at
times grapples with big ideas such as the close attachment of a world of
prophecy to a world of violence. Metcalf closes this review of Fenton's
latest collection, "hoping that Fenton will slough off a little more the pose of
left-handed diffidence" and accept "the mantle of greatness that is his."
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