James Fenton: War, Love & the Poetry of Witness

Born on April 25, 1949, James Fenton developed one of the most unusual literary careers of his generation. He became known as a poet of remarkable formal skill, but poetry was only one part of his life. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Southeast Asia, a political journalist, theater critic, book reviewer, art critic, librettist, essayist, garden writer, and Oxford Professor of Poetry. The experiences gathered through those different roles continually returned to his verse, producing poems about war, memory, political violence, travel, love, history, and the unsettling distance between what people believe about events and what actually happens.

Fenton’s poetry is often associated with political conflict because he witnessed history at extraordinarily close range. He reported from Vietnam and Cambodia during the violent final stages of the conflicts there and later returned to Southeast Asia as a correspondent during the political upheavals of the 1980s. Yet some of his most widely loved poems are about romantic disappointment, desire, companionship, and the almost comic difficulty of saying what love means. The same poet capable of confronting war and revolution could write with wit about a shabby Paris hotel room or the emotional chaos following a broken relationship.

That range has always made Fenton difficult to categorize neatly. He can sound traditional without being nostalgic, political without writing slogans, intellectual without abandoning emotion, and comic even when approaching subjects that are anything but funny. Behind all of those modes lies a fascination with memory: what people remember, what societies forget, what history conceals, and what poetry can recover from the spaces left behind.

🏡 Growing Up in England

James Martin Fenton was born in Lincoln, England, on April 25, 1949, and grew up in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire. His father, John Fenton, was an Anglican clergyman and biblical scholar, which meant that theology, scripture, language, and intellectual debate formed part of the environment surrounding him from an early age.

Fenton was educated at Durham Choristers School and Repton before attending Magdalen College, Oxford. His experience as a chorister has sometimes been connected with the strong musical quality of his later verse. Whatever its precise influence, rhythm became fundamental to his poetry. Even poems dealing with violence, political confusion, or historical catastrophe often possess a memorable musical structure underneath their apparent conversational ease.

He also developed an early fascination with W. H. Auden. Fenton encountered Auden’s poetry as a teenager and later studied at Oxford under poet John Fuller, who further encouraged that interest. Auden provided an important example of how a poet could write intelligently about politics and history without giving up technical elegance, humor, or formal experiment. Fenton would eventually develop a voice entirely his own, but the idea that poetry could engage seriously with public life remained central.

🎓 Oxford and an Early Prize

At Magdalen College, Fenton quickly attracted attention as a poet. In 1968, while still an undergraduate, he won Oxford University’s Newdigate Prize for his poem Our Western Furniture.

The work examines the nineteenth-century encounter between the United States and Japan and already contains several qualities that would characterize Fenton’s mature writing. He was interested in what happens when powerful cultures meet, how historical events are interpreted afterward, and how apparently orderly narratives conceal misunderstanding, ambition, violence, and cultural arrogance.

The choice of subject was unusual for such a young poet. Rather than beginning primarily with autobiography, Fenton was already looking outward toward history.

That outward gaze would remain important throughout his career. While many poets build their work principally around the development of the self, Fenton repeatedly turned toward places, conflicts, political events, art, and other people’s experiences. His poetry asks not only, “What am I feeling?” but also, “What is happening in the world, and how can we understand it?”

📚 Terminal Moraine

Fenton’s first full-length poetry collection, Terminal Moraine, appeared in 1972.

The book helped establish him as a significant young poet and contributed to his receiving an Eric Gregory Award, an honor intended to support promising British poets under thirty.

Instead of using the award simply to remain home and write, Fenton used the money to travel.

That decision changed his life.

Southeast Asia was entering one of the most turbulent periods in its modern history, and Fenton found himself moving directly toward events that would shape both his journalism and his poetry for decades.

The young poet became a reporter.

🌏 Southeast Asia

Fenton traveled through Southeast Asia as a freelance journalist during the final years of the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War. He reported on the American withdrawal from Vietnam and witnessed the collapse of the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia.

The experience forced him into close contact with the difference between political theories and their human consequences. Revolutions could seem exciting from a distance. Ideological movements could appear clean when summarized in newspapers or political arguments. Reality on the ground was much less orderly.

People disappeared.

Governments collapsed.

Armies retreated.

Refugees fled.

Political predictions proved disastrously wrong.

Fenton had gone to Asia curious about revolutionary movements and left with a much more complicated understanding of what political upheaval could mean for the people caught inside it.

Those experiences did not immediately become poems.

Like many writers who witness violence, Fenton needed distance before he could discover the form in which to write about what he had seen.

📰 Poetry and Journalism

Journalism became a major part of Fenton’s professional life. After returning to Britain, he worked for the New Statesman as a political and literary journalist. He later spent time in Germany as a correspondent for The Guardian, served as theater critic for The Sunday Times, became chief book reviewer for The Times, and eventually returned to Southeast Asia as a correspondent for The Independent.

These careers might appear separate from poetry, but they continually informed one another.

Journalism taught Fenton to observe concrete details.

Who is sitting in the room?

What are people eating?

What exactly happened?

What does the landscape look like?

Which detail contradicts the official story?

Poetry allowed him to take those observations somewhere else. A poem did not need to provide a complete report. It could isolate one unsettling image and allow that image to carry far more than a page of explanation.

Fenton learned how powerfully the factual and poetic could coexist.

🍾 “Dead Soldiers”

One of Fenton’s most memorable poems from his Southeast Asian experiences is “Dead Soldiers.”

The poem grows from a surreal meal Fenton attended in Cambodia in 1973 with Prince Norodom Chantaraingsey near a battlefield. Food and alcohol appear amid military activity while armored vehicles fire toward the jungle. The title plays upon a slang term for empty bottles while inevitably invoking the human dead produced by the conflict.

The scene is disturbing partly because people continue eating and drinking while war unfolds around them.

That juxtaposition became one of Fenton’s strengths.

He did not always need to tell readers that something was grotesque.

He could simply place the details beside one another.

The expensive meal.

The weapons.

The jokes.

The bottles.

The unseen enemy.

The knowledge, acquired later, that the political world surrounding the meal was about to disappear.

History enters through ordinary objects.

🕯️ Memory After Cambodia

Fenton’s relationship with Cambodia became particularly painful because subsequent events challenged some of the hopes and assumptions held by observers of the conflict.

The Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh in April 1975 and imposed a brutal revolutionary regime under which mass death followed through executions, forced labor, starvation, and disease.

Fenton’s poetry later returned to the terrible gap between expectation and aftermath.

This is one reason his political writing rarely behaves like propaganda.

Political certainty looks dangerous after history has contradicted it.

A person may believe one side represents liberation only to discover that victory has produced another catastrophe.

For Fenton, witnessing history created skepticism toward neat conclusions.

His strongest political poems tend to preserve ambiguity rather than resolve it.

🧠 The Memory of War

In 1982, Fenton published The Memory of War, the collection that established his reputation as a major political poet.

The title is important.

This is not simply “war.”

It is memory of war.

The difference matters because Fenton is interested in what happens after violence has occurred. How do individuals remember? How do nations memorialize? What gets recorded? What disappears? What do people deliberately forget because remembering would be intolerable?

Memory is unstable.

Official monuments can simplify it.

Personal recollection can distort it.

History books create narratives that appear orderly only after disorder has passed.

Fenton’s poetry inhabits the gaps between these competing versions.

🇩🇪 “A German Requiem”

“A German Requiem” is among Fenton’s most celebrated examinations of memory.

The poem approaches the legacy of World War II and Nazi Germany indirectly, concentrating less upon famous historical events than upon absence, reconstruction, forgetting, memorial rituals, and the spaces left by destruction.

This indirect method gives the poem unusual power.

Cities can be rebuilt.

Buildings can return.

Streets can acquire new names.

But reconstruction does not erase what happened.

Sometimes absence becomes more powerful than presence.

A missing building reveals destruction.

A silence reveals someone who is no longer there.

A forgotten story points toward a memory people once found too painful to preserve.

Fenton’s poem asks how societies live with catastrophic history once the generation that experienced it begins disappearing.

👧 Children in Exile

Fenton continued exploring displacement and political violence in Children in Exile.

The title poem concerns Cambodian children living far from the country into which they had been born. Their situation demonstrates one of war’s consequences that receives less attention than battles themselves: people survive but lose the world that made home recognizable.

Exile creates a complicated form of survival.

A child can become physically safe while remaining psychologically connected to a place associated with danger and loss.

Memory travels with refugees.

So do nightmares.

Fenton’s interest lies not simply in political causes but in what those causes do to individual lives.

A revolution may be summarized in a paragraph.

A displaced childhood lasts much longer.

🧭 The Poet as Witness

Fenton is often called a political poet, but the phrase can be misleading.

He does not generally write as if poetry exists to explain the correct political position.

Instead, he writes as a witness.

Witnessing requires attention.

It also requires humility.

The person standing near an event may still misunderstand it.

The journalist may discover later that an interpretation was wrong.

The poet may know that hindsight changes memory.

This uncertainty is central to Fenton’s political writing.

He remains suspicious of the confidence with which people explain complicated events from a safe distance.

Reality tends to resist the clean moral arrangements people prefer.

🇵🇭 Returning to Asia

During the 1980s, Fenton returned to Southeast Asia as a correspondent, reporting from the region during another period of political upheaval.

His writing on the Philippines examined the final years of Ferdinand Marcos’s rule and the political transformation surrounding the 1986 People Power Revolution. His reportage from the region eventually contributed to All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim.

The title again reveals Fenton’s characteristic irony.

Journalists supposedly travel to the right place at the right time.

Fenton portrays the experience as considerably less controlled.

A reporter arrives.

Events change.

Rumors compete with facts.

Political actors miscalculate.

Revolutions move faster than explanations.

The person documenting history is always partly adrift inside it.

📖 All the Wrong Places

Published in 1988, All the Wrong Places gathered Fenton’s journalism and reflections on Southeast Asia.

The book demonstrates how closely his journalism and poetry overlap.

Both depend on observation.

Both distrust simplified explanations.

Both notice absurd details surrounding serious events.

Political journalism often becomes dated because the immediate event passes.

Fenton’s best reportage survives because he is interested in more than the headline.

He watches people behaving inside history.

That behavior remains recognizable even after the political circumstances change.

❤️ The Other James Fenton

Readers encountering Fenton through The Memory of War might reasonably expect his poetry to remain dominated by history and political violence.

Then they encounter the love poems.

The shift can be startling.

The poet who writes about war also writes about romantic confusion with extraordinary directness, humor, musicality, and vulnerability.

This is not really a contradiction.

Love also produces uncertainty.

People misread one another.

Expectations collapse.

Memory revises events.

The heart creates stories every bit as unreliable as political ideology.

Fenton simply moves the same intelligence into another territory.

🇫🇷 “In Paris with You”

“In Paris with You” became perhaps Fenton’s most widely loved romantic poem.

The poem deliberately resists the conventional mythology of Paris as the perfect city of romance. Instead of grand monuments and elegant sightseeing, the lovers inhabit an imperfect hotel room while the speaker carries emotional damage from an earlier relationship.

The humor comes partly from this refusal of romantic scenery.

Paris exists, but the speaker would rather remain inside.

Love is present, but he refuses to speak about it too solemnly.

The poem continually moves between irony and sincerity until distinguishing the two becomes difficult.

That balance is quintessential Fenton.

A joke can conceal emotion.

Sarcasm can protect vulnerability.

Someone who insists he does not want to talk about love may be talking about almost nothing else.

💔 Love, Danger & Emotional Risk

Fenton’s love poetry often presents intimacy as dangerous precisely because it requires giving another person emotional power.

The title Out of Danger captures this tension beautifully.

To be safely out of danger sounds desirable.

But complete safety may also require withdrawing from the experiences that make life meaningful.

Love exposes people.

So does friendship.

So does political commitment.

So does witnessing history.

A person who refuses all risk may avoid pain while also avoiding connection.

Fenton’s romantic poetry therefore shares more with his political poems than first appears.

Both ask what happens when people enter situations they cannot completely control.

📘 Out of Danger

Published in the 1990s, Out of Danger brought together love poems, political poems, comic verse, and work responding to international events.

The collection demonstrated just how broad Fenton’s poetic range had become.

Tiananmen Square appears alongside romance.

Political violence appears beside playfulness.

Public history and private emotion occupy the same book.

In 1994, Out of Danger received the Whitbread Poetry Award.

By then, Fenton had already spent decades being described as one of the most gifted poets of his generation. The prize confirmed that his relatively infrequent publication had not diminished his standing.

Fenton has never been a poet of enormous output.

He tends to publish selectively.

That scarcity has become part of his reputation.

🐢 Writing Slowly

Fenton’s poetry career is notable for the long gaps between major collections.

This can appear surprising when compared with poets who produce a new book every few years.

Yet Fenton’s approach seems closely connected with his sense that a poem should justify its existence.

He has worked in countless forms of prose—journalism, criticism, art writing, theater reviewing, lectures, gardening essays—without feeling that every observation needed to become a poem.

Poetry remained a particular kind of pressure.

Some experiences required years before they became usable.

Some never became poems at all.

The relatively small body of verse therefore contains an unusually large range of experience.

🎼 Formal Skill

Fenton’s poems often sound effortless, but their construction can be highly controlled.

He uses rhyme, repetition, refrains, ballad rhythms, song forms, dramatic monologues, and traditional structures while avoiding the feeling that form has been imposed mechanically upon the subject.

His political poetry is especially interesting in this respect.

A subject associated with newspaper urgency can be placed inside a form whose roots stretch back centuries.

Political events pass quickly.

Form slows them down.

A headline disappears tomorrow.

A poem can continue asking what the event meant decades later.

That tension between immediacy and durability is central to Fenton’s art.

🎵 Poetry That Wants to Be Heard

Fenton’s verse often reveals itself most fully when spoken aloud.

His rhythms can carry echoes of songs, ballads, nursery rhymes, marching chants, public recitation, and popular verse.

This musical quality allows serious subjects to become memorable without reducing their seriousness.

The contradiction is deliberate.

A catchy rhythm can carry disturbing content.

A refrain can become sinister through repetition.

A playful rhyme can suddenly reveal grief.

Fenton understands that music can lure readers deeper into material they might otherwise resist.

The pleasure of sound does not cancel the gravity of meaning.

Sometimes it intensifies it.

🎭 The Theater Critic

From 1979 to 1984, Fenton served as theater critic for The Sunday Times.

The job required him to watch performances constantly and translate immediate theatrical experience into criticism written under deadline.

Theater reinforced his awareness of voice.

A poem is not merely words arranged visually on a page.

Someone might speak those words.

The breath matters.

Timing matters.

Silence matters.

The relationship with an audience matters.

This theatrical sensibility later became even more visible when Fenton began writing and adapting material directly for performance.

🎼 Opera, Musicals & Libretti

Fenton’s facility with meter and language made him particularly well suited to musical theater and opera.

During the 1980s, he contributed to the development of the English-language version of Les Misérables. He later worked on operatic translations and libretti, including projects connected with works such as Rigoletto, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and other theatrical productions.

Writing words intended to be sung creates different demands from writing poetry for the page.

Meaning must work with music.

Vowels matter differently.

A line must survive performance.

The audience cannot stop and reread a complicated sentence while the orchestra continues.

Fenton’s work across poetry and theater demonstrates how seriously he takes the physical sound of language.

🐴 The Orphan of Zhao and Don Quixote

Fenton has also adapted major works for the stage.

His theatrical work includes The Orphan of Zhao, based on the ancient Chinese story sometimes described as a Chinese counterpart to great Western revenge tragedies, and an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

These projects again reveal his fascination with literature crossing languages, historical periods, and cultural boundaries.

The same curiosity visible in Our Western Furniture during his Oxford years remained alive decades later.

Cultures meet.

Stories travel.

Texts change as they enter another language and theatrical tradition.

For Fenton, adaptation is not merely preservation.

It is another form of encounter.

🎨 Writing About Art

Fenton’s interests extend deeply into visual art.

He has written criticism and essays on artists, collections, museums, sculpture, painting, and the institutional history of art.

His book Leonardo’s Nephew gathered essays on art and artists, while School of Genius examined the history of the Royal Academy of Arts.

This interest connects naturally with his poetry.

A painting requires careful looking.

So does a political event.

So does a poem.

The observer must notice details without assuming the first interpretation is sufficient.

Art criticism trains the eye in exactly the kind of patience Fenton’s poetry often demands.

🌱 The Poet in the Garden

Fenton even became known for writing about gardening.

A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed approaches gardening with the same mixture of practical intelligence and curiosity visible elsewhere in his work.

The apparent distance between Cambodia and a packet of flower seeds is large, but Fenton’s career has never depended upon keeping subjects in separate compartments.

A writer can be interested in war and tulips.

Politics and opera.

Tiananmen Square and roses.

The assumption that serious writers must cultivate a narrow range of subjects would have excluded much of Fenton’s best work.

Curiosity is the connecting principle.

🎓 Oxford Professor of Poetry

In 1994, Fenton was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, succeeding Seamus Heaney. He held the position until 1999.

The role is one of the most prestigious appointments in British poetry and has been held by writers including Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Simon Armitage, and Alice Oswald.

Fenton used the lectures associated with the professorship to think broadly about poetry, poetic technique, literary history, influence, and how poems actually work.

Those lectures were later collected in The Strength of Poetry.

The title captures an important aspect of Fenton’s critical approach.

Poetry’s strength does not depend upon grand declarations about its importance.

The strength is inside the poem.

The critic’s job is to discover how it got there.

📖 The Strength of Poetry

Fenton’s criticism is often particularly valuable because he writes as a practitioner.

He knows that poets make technical decisions even when readers experience the finished work as apparently spontaneous.

A rhythm is chosen.

A word is rejected.

A stanza changes shape.

An ending arrives too early and must be rebuilt.

His Oxford lectures examine poetry through that practical understanding of craft.

They also reveal a reader with enormous range.

Fenton can move comfortably between canonical writers, contemporary poetry, formal questions, biography, literary gossip, and close attention to individual lines.

For him, literary criticism is not an autopsy.

It is an attempt to understand why something remains alive.

🏅 The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry

In 2007, Fenton received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

The honor placed him within a distinguished tradition of recipients including W. H. Auden, Robert Graves, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, Edwin Morgan, and later Simon Armitage.

By then, Fenton’s career had already stretched across nearly four decades.

The award recognized not one specific period of achievement but an unusually varied literary life.

The undergraduate poet who won the Newdigate Prize had become a war correspondent, political writer, critic, professor, dramatist, art historian, gardener, translator, and one of Britain’s most respected living poets.

Yet the body of poetry itself remained relatively compact.

Its influence was larger than its size.

🌷 Yellow Tulips

Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968–2011 offered readers a broad view across Fenton’s poetic career.

The collection gathers more than four decades of work and reveals how persistent certain concerns have been.

War.

Love.

History.

Memory.

Political illusion.

Loss.

Humor.

Travel.

Beauty.

Violence.

The title itself is revealing because tulips seem far removed from the subjects with which Fenton is most strongly associated.

Yet beauty has always existed beside danger in his poetry.

A flower does not erase catastrophe.

Neither does catastrophe make beauty meaningless.

Fenton’s work frequently asks readers to accept that contradictory realities coexist.

🗃️ The James Fenton Archive

In 2023, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced that it had acquired Fenton’s archive.

The collection includes notebooks, manuscript drafts, typescripts, correspondence, photographs, and other materials documenting his long career as a poet, journalist, critic, and cultural observer.

Literary archives are particularly revealing for writers like Fenton because his published poetry can appear so polished.

The finished poem hides the labor.

Drafts reveal alternatives.

Crossed-out lines reveal decisions.

Notebooks show ideas before they acquired form.

Correspondence places poems within friendships and historical circumstances.

An archive allows readers to see that apparent inevitability is created through revision.

🧩 The Value of the Unfinished

Fenton himself responded to the preservation of his archive by expressing hope that future researchers might discover some unexpected clue within it.

That idea suits his entire career.

Meaning often emerges from fragments.

A remembered meal explains something about a vanished Cambodia.

An empty space in a German city reveals what was destroyed.

A draft reveals the line the poet decided not to use.

An old letter changes how a friendship is understood.

History is rarely complete.

Literary history is no different.

Archives preserve not only finished achievements but the uncertain process that created them.

🕰️ Memory and Forgetting

Memory may be the deepest thread connecting Fenton’s apparently different subjects.

War creates memory.

Love creates memory.

Travel creates memory.

Nations create public memory.

Monuments attempt to control memory.

Archives attempt to preserve it.

Poetry transforms it.

Yet forgetting is equally important.

People forget because time passes.

They forget deliberately.

Governments encourage particular versions of history.

Families omit uncomfortable stories.

Individuals protect themselves by turning painful experience into something less immediate.

Fenton’s poetry repeatedly occupies the unstable border between remembering and forgetting.

What disappears can be as important as what remains.

⚠️ Politics Without Certainty

Fenton’s years as a journalist taught him to distrust the idea that history moves according to simple moral scripts.

Political movements that promise liberation can become oppressive.

Governments that claim stability can collapse rapidly.

Foreign observers can misread local conflicts.

Victories can become catastrophes.

This does not mean political judgment is impossible.

It means judgment requires attention to consequences rather than slogans.

Fenton’s political poetry gains much of its power from refusing the comfort of hindsight.

Readers encounter uncertainty rather than being allowed to stand safely outside it.

History is happening before anyone knows what it will become.

❤️ Love Without Sentimentality

The same refusal of easy certainty shapes Fenton’s love poetry.

Romance is not automatically noble.

People rebound from failed relationships.

They misunderstand one another.

They behave badly.

They want intimacy while protecting themselves from vulnerability.

Humor becomes a useful defense.

Yet beneath the jokes, the desire for connection remains completely serious.

This is why poems such as “In Paris with You” continue to attract readers.

They sound like actual emotional life.

Love can be ridiculous and profound at the same time.

Fenton does not force readers to choose.

🎶 The Power of Repetition

Repetition appears frequently in Fenton’s poetry.

A phrase returns.

A rhythm circles back.

A refrain becomes altered by what happens between appearances.

This technique connects several of his major concerns.

History repeats.

Political rhetoric repeats.

Memory repeats.

Songs repeat.

Arguments repeat.

People tell themselves the same stories until circumstances make those stories impossible to believe.

Repetition therefore becomes both musical and intellectual.

The repeated phrase may sound beautiful.

It may also reveal a trap.

📚 Why James Fenton Matters

James Fenton matters because he has demonstrated how widely poetry can travel without losing precision.

A poem can enter war without becoming journalism.

It can enter politics without becoming a manifesto.

It can become funny without becoming trivial.

It can talk about love without pretending lovers behave sensibly.

It can borrow the rhythms of songs while carrying the weight of historical catastrophe.

His work also demonstrates the value of looking outward.

The poet’s life matters, but the world outside the poet matters too.

Foreign places are not scenery.

Political events are not background.

History continually shapes private experience.

Fenton’s poems often begin with the recognition that the writer is only one person inside something much larger.

🌍 The World Beyond the Self

One of the most distinctive features of Fenton’s career is his willingness to allow the world to interrupt literary life.

He could have remained within universities and publishing circles after Oxford.

Instead, he traveled into unstable political situations.

He worked on newspapers.

He watched theater night after night.

He studied paintings.

He wrote about gardens.

He collaborated with composers and theatrical companies.

Each activity enlarged the territory available to his poetry.

This outward curiosity prevents Fenton’s work from becoming sealed inside autobiography.

The self is present.

But it is not always the most interesting thing in the room.

🎂 James Fenton’s Literary Legacy

Born on April 25, 1949, James Fenton has spent his career moving between worlds that literary culture often keeps separate. Journalism and poetry. Politics and love. War reporting and gardening. Theater criticism and art history. Southeast Asian revolutions and English lyric tradition.

Those worlds become coherent because Fenton approaches them with the same essential habits: look carefully, listen closely, distrust easy explanations, and pay attention to what disappears from the official story.

His experience in Vietnam and Cambodia gave him an unusually intimate perspective on political upheaval. The Memory of War transformed that experience into poetry concerned not only with violence but with the way violence survives inside memory. Children in Exile examined what happens when history forces people away from home. Out of Danger demonstrated that the poet of political catastrophe could also become an unforgettable poet of romantic uncertainty.

Across all of these subjects, Fenton remains interested in what people fail to understand while events are actually occurring. History becomes obvious only afterward. Love makes sense only after it has gone wrong. Memory edits the past even while trying to preserve it.

That uncertainty gives his work much of its lasting power.

Fenton does not write as though poetry can solve history.

He writes as though poetry can make us look at history again.

It can return us to the scene.

It can point toward the empty space.

It can remind us of the person who disappeared from the photograph.

It can question the certainty with which we once explained what happened.

And then, unexpectedly, it can turn toward love, make us laugh, and reveal that private life contains its own forms of danger.

James Fenton’s body of poetry is not enormous.

The world inside it is.

Jerusalem

Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone,
And the interrogation will not die
For there is no eternal city
And there is no pity
And there is nothing underneath the sky
No rainbow and no guarantee –
There is no covenant between your God and me.

It is superb in the air.
Suffering is everywhere
And each man wears his suffering like a skin.
My history is proud.
Mine is not allowed
This is the cistern where all wars begin,
The laughter from the armoured car.
This is the man who won’t believe you’re what you are.

This is your fault.
This is a crusader vault.
The Brook of Kidron flows from Mea She’arim.
I will pray for you.
I will tell you what to do.
I’ll stone you. I shall break your every limb.
Oh I am not afraid of you
But maybe I should fear the things you make me do.

This is not Golgotha.
This is the Holy Sepulchre,
The Emperor Hadrian’s temple to a love
Which he did not much share.
Golgotha could be anywhere.
Jerusalem itself is on the move.
It leaps and leaps from hill to hill
And as it makes its way it also makes its will.

The city was sacked.
Jordan was driven back.
The pious Christians burned the Jews alive.
This is a minaret.
I’m not finished yet.
We’re waiting for reinforcements to arrive.
What was your mother’s real name?
Would it be safe today to go to Bethlehem?

This is the Garden Tomb.
No, this is the Garden Tomb.
I’m an Armenian. I am a Copt.
This is Utopia.
I came here from Ethiopia.
This hole is where the flying carpet dropped
The Prophet off to pray one night
And from here one hour later he resumed his flight.

Who packed your bag?
I packed my bag.
Where was your uncle’s mother’s sister born?
Have you ever met an Arab?
Yes I am a scarab.
I am a worm. I am a thing of scorn.
I cry Impure from street to street.
And see my degradation in the eyes I meet.

I am your enemy.
This is Gethsemane.
The broken graves look to the Temple Mount.
Tell me now, tell me when
When shall we all rise again?
Shall I be first in that great body count?
When shall the tribes be gathered in?
When, tell me, when shall the Last Things begin?

You are in error.
This is terror.
This is your banishment. This land is mine.
This is what you earn.
This is the Law of No Return.
This is the sour dough, this the sweet wine.
This is my history, this my race
And this unhappy man threw acid in my face.

Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone.
These are the warrior archaeologists.
This is us and that is them.
This is Jerusalem.
These are the dying men with tattooed wrists.
Do this and I’ll destroy your home.
I have destroyed your home. You have destroyed my home.

-James Fenton