James Fenton has a unique voice - as distinctive as Jeremy Prynne's; and considerably more able to use that voice for genuine communication than Prynne has ever been. But Fenton's output is tiny, and even then he manages to include large sections of incomprehensibly modernist esoterica (such as the conversation with Emily Dickinson about her feet in the Manila Manifesto).
This is a wonderful poem, and everybody ought to know it. But you can't blame English poetry for neglecting a poet so deliberately costive of output; I'm not even sure it is fair to contrast Fenton's accessibility with Geoffrey Hill's patricianism (Hill's September Song is easier to decode than - say - The Ballad of the Shrieking Man).
Fenton is often a difficult poet. When he isn't (and sometimes when he is) he can also be a mighty poet. The same is broadly true of Geoffrey Hill.
God captures a lot of Fenton's ability to be very serious while simultaneously staying utterly trivial. The first preposterous rime enjamb (sandwich / hand which) shakes me out of the complacent piety which I usually deploy for eschatological poems, enjamb rimes after that (tell you / bell you) just remind me that Fenton is the kind of poet so far in control of his craft that he can pass me distressing truths while making me laugh at the way he phrases them.
The mis-scansion of the penult has always seemed to me precisely right:
That's ALL YOU ARE [ - ] says Th'Almighty
It isn't difficult to make a missing unstressed syllable audible in a reading - Chaucer does it in the first line of the Canterbury Tales - and I can hear God's sigh of exasperation clearly in the void.
I think I can also hear it in Spoken Verse' memorable delivery of the piece:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE8h-j6upeY&feature=plcp
I'm surprised at how many of my favourite poets have already turned up in these selections - perhaps my taste in contemporary poetry isn't quite as eccentric as I had feared.