Books by Fenton (with commentary by James Fenton)

Books Edited or Introduced by Fenton

Our Western Furniture (1968)

Sycamore Press Our Western Furniture was written as a Newdigate Prize Poem. The set subject for that year was "The Opening of Japan, 1853-4". The theme (later used by Stephen Sondheim for the musical Pacific Overtures, 1976) had been chosen by the then Professor of Poetry, Edmund Blunden, who had a long connection with Japan. The form of the poem reflected a desire to use the maximum number of lines allowed: 300. There are 21 sonnets and two haikus, arranged thus: 7 sonnets, haiku, 7 sonnets, haiku, 7 sonnets. The middle sonnet had the chiasmic rhyme-scheme: ABCDEFG GFEDCBA. The poem won the prize, was broadcast on radio by the poet and producer George Macbeth, and was hand-printed by the poet John Fuller at the Sycamore Press. Fuller had been my tutor in English for my first two terms at Oxford. The press was in his garage. Our Western Furniture, dedicated to the future novelist and biographer Jonathan Keates, a friend and contemporary at Magdalen College, was reprinted in Terminal Moraine, but dropped from later collections. -- JF

Put Thou Thy Tears into My Bottle (1969)

Sycamore Press Put Thou Thy Tears in My Bottle was a title chosen at random from the Psalms (slightly misquoted) for two poems that appeared in the series Sycamore Broadsheets, also printed by John Fuller. -- JF

Terminal Moraine (1972)

Secker and Warburg Terminal Moraine was published by Secker and Warburg in a poetry series edited by the poet and literary editor of the New Statesman, Anthony Thwaite, who printed my first poem to appear in a magazine, and gave me regular work, while still a student, reviewing fiction. Many of the poems in this volume were written while I was still an undergraduate. They show the very obvious influence of the poets I most admired at the time, including Auden, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Anthony Hecht. There is an interest in found poetry and nonsense. -- JF

A Vacant Possession (1978)

TNR Publications A Vacant Possession was published by TNR Publications, which was an imprint of The New Review under its editor Ian Hamilton, another poet who gave me work (on the TLS and The New Review) . It contains five poems. "Song" ("The Killer Snails") was later dedicated to Philip Dennis, who sang it in a setting by Michael Nyman, commissioned by a television arts programme. "In a Notebook" takes a Cambodian scene from an abandoned poem. -- JF

A German Requiem: A Poem (1980)

Salamander Press A German Requiem was written in Berlin, when I was working for the Guardian as a German correspondent. It first appeared, under a different title and in a slightly different form, in the magazine Quarto, then edited by the poet Craig Raine. When my brother, Tom Fenton, began his own garage press in Edinburgh and asked for something to set, I added the epigraph from Hobbes, and the verse paragraphs were laid out one to a page, to give a more spacious effect. The poem's dedication should read, To T.J.G.A., without any hyphen, the dedicatee being the writer Tim Garton Ash, with whom I spent much time in Berlin. This pamphlet won the Southern Arts Literature Award for Poetry in 1981. -- JF

Dead Soldiers (1981)

Sycamore Press Another of John Fuller's hand-printed pamphlets, Dead Soldiers is a poem written on the realisation that a man I used to know in Cambodia was the brother of the notorious Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot. The title is a play on the Cambodian slang term for an empty bottle. -- JF

The Memory of War: Poems 1968-1982 (1982)

Salamander Press The Memory of War was the first full-length book published by my brother's Salamander Press. In the very first printing, the poem, Dead Soldiers, had a defective text, reflecting an early draft. An insert was printed giving the full version of the poem (as printed previously by the Sycamore Press). When setting up Salamander, my brother bought up the remainder stock of Terminal Moraine and soon sold it off at a profit. This money went into the production of The Memory of War. Some of the poems in Terminal Moraine were included in that edition, other were dropped. I looked back on some found poetry in old notebooks and printed some of this material for the first time under the title Exempla, together with poems incorporating or inspired by found material. All this (section IV of the book) was student work from Oxford days. The Memory of War began with A German Requiem, and went on to a section of recent poems, including those published in A Vacant Possession. This volume was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. -- JF

Children in Exile (1983)

Salamander Press Children in Exile was a short hardback volume again published by my brother at Salamander Press. The earliest state of this volume has a plain white paper protective cover. Later copies have an acetate cover. The poems from this volume were combined with those from The Memory of War to make the Penguin volume, which was called The Memory of War and Children in Exile. In the States this combined volume, which included everything I wanted to preserve of what I had so far written, was called simply Children in Exile. -- JF

You Were Marvellous (1983)

Jonathan Cape When I was Chief Theatre Critic of the Sunday Times, I used to go to plays five, six or sometimes seven times a week (it was possible to go every day if , as I often did, one spent a weekend in Paris, where the theatres put on Sunday matinees). I was very happy to see so much theatre and loved writing about it. Not all of this work has been collected. This volume selects from reviews published between 1979 and 1981. -- JF

Partingtime Hall (with John Fuller, 1987)

Viking / Salamander Press Some of these comical poems are written by John Fuller, some by me, but most have some element of collaboration, including the long title poem which we wrote together, sitting in the same room. -- JF

All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim (1988)

Viking; Atlantic Monthly Press (1988); Granta (2005) Originally published in England in 1988, and in the States the next year, this collection of reportage has recently been reissued with a new introduction. The sections on Vietnam and Cambodia are the remains of an unfinished book, which was to have been called The Decent Interval (someone else used the title), describing Indochina in the years between American withdrawal and the collapse of the regimes in Saigon and Phnom Penh (1973-75). The section on the Philippines was written for Granta, and describes the fall of President Marcos in 1986, and its aftermath. Having made my acquaintance with Filipino politics in such dramatic circumstances, I went back to Manila for the Independent and followed the early years of the Cory Aquino regime. At the same time I kept a watching brief on South Korea, which I had first visited at the time of the uprising in Kwangju and its notorious suppression . This book is dedicated to Bill Buford, who published most of the material in it when he was editor of Granta. -- JF

Manila Envelope (1989)

Self published When I lived in Manila, I knew several aspiring poets who felt some frustration at the lack of any outlets for their work. I suggested self-publishing as the answer. This is what I had done over the years with John Fuller and with my brother. Poetry publishing is anyway a small-scale operation. In Manila,where the situation was ideal for the small press, such ventures were not well known. This publication consisted of a book of poems called Manila Envelope, a manifesto called the Manila Manifesto, a poster poem of the Ballad of the Shrieking Man (illustrated by Nicholas Garland), a postcard advertising the publishing activities of the friends who put this together, an envelope in which everything was supposed to arrive (the circulation was entirely by mail). Often there would have been a letter from myself enclosed as well, thanking the subscriber. The envelope has its own interest. It was illustrated with a drawing of the approach to the prawn/shrimp farm I was running at the time on Baluti island, Quezon province, drawn by the young Alexander Garland, son of Nick and future author of The Beach and of the film 28 Days Later. -- JF

Out of Danger (1994)

Penguin; Farrar Straus Giroux Essentially this is my second collection of poems. It contains everything that was in the Manila Envelope (including the text of the manifesto) plus subsequent poems. This won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. -- JF

Leonardo's Nephew (1998)

Summary forthcoming ...

The Strength of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (2001)

Summary forthcoming ...

A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed (2001)

Viking / Farrar, Straus and Giroux It seemed a simple and interesting idea for a newspaper column: what plants would you choose if starting a garden from scratch, given that you were only allowed to propagate them from seed? The resulting articles were collected and published in Britain in 2001, and in America a year later. The list is a mixture of the very obvious, such as nasturtiums and forget-me-nots, and rarer items such as Venus's Navelwort (one of the characteristic plants in my garden). The emphasis is on childish simplicity of approach, and - although this kind of gardening often has its setbacks - economy of outlay. -- JF

An Introduction to English Poetry (2002)

Summary forthcoming ...

The Love Bomb (2003)

Penguin / Faber and Faber Collected here are texts for three musical pieces. "The Fall of Jerusalem" is an oratorio commissioned for the millennium. The music is by Dominic Muldowney. The text is based on Josephus's account of the events leading up to Masada. "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" is an opera, premiered in 2004 by the New York City Opera. The music is by Charles Wuorinen. The text is an adaptation of the children's book with which Salman Rushdie made his reply to the famous fatwa. "The Love Bomb" was written as an original, libretto for a composer who decided he didn't want it. I hope that in due course we will find someone to commission John Harle, the English saxophonist and composer, to write it. The story is about a suicide cult. All of these poetic texts are intended to be of interest on the page as well as in performance, and I have included "The Love Bomb" among my Selected Poems. -- JF

School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts (2006)

From the Royal Academy of Arts Website: "This outstanding publication is a meticulously researched and highly illustrated portrait of the development of the Royal Academy of Arts from its foundation in 1768 to the present day. Through unlimited access to the secrets of the Academy’s library and archive, and interviews with senior Academicians, James Fenton weaves an accessible and entertaining narrative as he tells the colourful and often turbulent story of this unique institution".

Selected Poems (2006)

Penguin From the Publisher: Penguin's Selected Poems is the first full selection of James Fenton's poems to be published, and represents the whole range of his work from light-verse to political and love poems to opera libretti. It includes early work from The Memory of War and Children in Exile as well as later work from Out of Danger, which won the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1994. Also represented are examples of his work in verse for the stage and recent unpublished poems.

Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968-2011 (2012)

Faber and Faber From the Publisher: Yellow Tulips is a gathering from four decades of work by a writer described by the Observer as 'the most talented poet of his generation'. Winner of both the Queen's Gold Medal and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, James Fenton has given readers some of the most memorable lyric verse of the past decades, from the formal skill that marked his debut, Terminal Moraine, to the dramatic and political monologues of The Memory of War and Children in Exile, through to the unforgettable love poems of Out of Danger. This assembly, made by the author himself, includes a generous offering of his most recent, uncollected work: it is an essential selection by, as Stephen Spender put it, 'a brilliant poet of technical virtuosity'.