The impact of James Fenton's best poems comes from the surprise of encountering the unexpected within his otherwise careful formal strategies. This seeming contradiction is a two-edged sword, however, for in Fenton's poetry there is also a distance between the poet and the poem, which is created by artifice, and which robs his most accomplished verses of their effect.

The Memory of War begins with a sequence of poems titled 'A German Requiem'…. The poet is presented as the observer of decay, the chronicler of a process of fading. From this stance comes the poet's detachment, for though he is himself a builder, he is working in a style which has been subject to considerable decay; he uses this fact consciously in the echoes he evokes. It is a war with memory, as much as a memory of war.

This tradition which Fenton follows was once described by...