['Our Western Furniture', one of the poems in Terminal Moraine], is an astonishing piece of work. Fenton's theme is the commercial opening-up of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century by Commodore Perry, and he uses it to provide all sorts of brilliant pictures and to strike off a variety of attitudes. The sequence shows Japanese and American reactions to each other, Perry's dreams of the distant country after his return, his death, and in the final sonnet a non-moral reflection on history's contradictions….

Such a writer gives the impression of being so accomplished that he has nothing to learn. It is true that with all this ingenuity and inventive power goes a certain quirkiness, a determination to have fun, which is exhilarating but has its dangers. A long poem called 'The Fruit-Grower in War-Time (and some of his enemies)' uses passages from a book on fruit-growing to point...