James Fenton theatre critic of the Sunday Times.
The leading lights of Bulacan – The bruisers and the dreamers – Are politicians to a man. Their names go on the streamers.
But if their chief’s an also-ran The dreamers and the bruisers Mingle beneath the ceiling-fan With schemers and Yakuzas.
To work and live as best they can The bruisers and the dreamers Take forged assignments in Japan By cruisers and by steamers.
But...
What you need for poetry is a body and a voice. It doesn’t have to be a great body or a great voice. But it ought ideally to be your body, and it ought to be your voice.
***
The parent helps the child discover what may be done with its lips and its limbs. This is the first poetry.
***
A sort of night then falls – a melancholy mercy – after which the...
Beauty, danger and dismay Met me on the public way. Whichever I chose, I chose dismay.
The MistakeWith the mistake your life goes in reverse. Now you can see exactly what you did Wrong yesterday and wrong the day before And each mistake leads back to something worse
And every nuance of your hypocrisy Towards yourself and every excuse Stands solidly on the...
To G.L.
The sea sounds insincere Giving and taking with one hand. It stopped a river here last month Filling its mouth with sand.
They drag the shallows for the milkfish fry – Two eyes on a glass noodle, nothing more. Roused by his vigilant young wife The drowsy stevedore
Comes running barefoot past the swamp To meet a load of wood. The yellow peaked cap, the patched pink shorts Seem to...
One of the great attractions of James Fenton’s verse is the way it manages so often to be both plain and cryptic at once. It urges us to think about what we can’t quite know, and it...
Every handful of John Updike’s silver has its square coin, its bad penny, its fake. This exquisitely careful writer tends to relax into flamboyance: it is the verbal equivalent of...
For a writer who several years ago published a ‘Manifesto Against Manifestoes’, James Fenton has published his fair share of manifestoes, including a disguised one for a...
So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as...
The bloodiness of the events of the Seventies in Cambodia, and the desperate nature of the refugee exodus, have been of such monstrous proportions as to hinder the emergence of detailed accounts...
There remains a most decided difference – indeed it grows wider every year – between what Philip Larkin calls ‘being a writer’, or ‘being a poet’, and managing...
No one can have been more surprised than James Fenton that In Memory of War turned out to be one of the most acclaimed books of 1982. A year ago, used to being told by reviewers that he was a...
By and large we are interested in the thoughts, opinions and intentions of writers we are interested in, and by and large writers are keen to express these things in reviews, essays and memoirs...
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