My dear Mr. – Uh, dear anonymous poster:
Fenton is a leftie type, or at least he WAS, New Statesman and all that, but he keeps that out of his poetry. I’m not so sure. No one writes better political poetry than Fenton has:
Cut-Throat Christ, Tiananmen, The Ballad of the Imam and the Shaw, Out of the East, Blood and Lead, his going after Vendler, and
Jerusalem (“The pious Christians burned the Jews alive”)—all from the same collection.
I like the “
diet of worms,” which was very much a political body.
And the Poet Laureate writes political stuff about being a woman and being gay.
Well, as you know, Fenton is certainly gay. The most beautiful love poem by a living poet in our language that I have yet read is Fenton’s
I'll Explain. Though a gay man wrote it the poem is genderless so anyone in love or who has been in love will directly relate to it. Which is kind of the point. Always political, that James.
Don