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“... The leading lights of Bulacan – The bruisers and the dreamers – Are politicians to a man. Their names go on the streamers. But if their chief’s an also-ran The dreamers and the bruisers Mingle beneath the ceiling-fan With schemers and Yakuzas. To work and live as best they can The bruisers and the dreamers Take forged assignments in Japan By cruisers and by steamers ...”

“... To G.L. The sea sounds insincere Giving and taking with one hand. It stopped a river here last month Filling its mouth with sand. They drag the shallows for the milkfish fry – Two eyes on a glass noodle, nothing more. Roused by his vigilant young wife The drowsy stevedore Comes running barefoot past the swamp To meet a load of wood. The yellow peaked cap, the patched pink shorts Seem to be all his worldly goods ...”

“... Beauty, Danger and Dismay Beauty, danger and dismay Met me on the public way. Whichever I chose, I chose dismay. The Mistake With the mistake your life goes in reverse. Now you can see exactly what you did Wrong yesterday and wrong the day before And each mistake leads back to something worse And every nuance of your hypocrisy Towards yourself and every excuse Stands solidly on the perspective lines And there is perfect visibility ...”

“... Manila Manifesto What you need for poetry is a body and a voice. It doesn’t have to be a great body or a great voice. But it ought ideally to be your body, and it ought to be your voice. *** The parent helps the child discover what may be done with its lips and its limbs. This is the first poetry. *** A sort of night then falls – a melancholy mercy – after which the initiation is mysteriously forgotten ...”

“... Craig Raine’s second collection follows swiftly upon his first, The Onion, Memory (1978). It is as if the poet had been waiting impatiently over us, while we picked ourselves up off the canvas, before delivering the second blow. A Martian sends a postcard home is a slimmer volume than its predecessor, but it will do more than simply consolidate a reputation already made ...”

“... No one can have been more surprised than James Fenton that In Memory of War turned out to be one of the most acclaimed books of 1982. A year ago, used to being told by reviewers that he was a ‘difficult’, even ‘esoteric’ poet, it looked as if he had decided that small publishers and little magazines were the most appropriate place for his work ...”

“... One of the great attractions of James Fenton’s verse is the way it manages so often to be both plain and cryptic at once. It urges us to think about what we can’t quite know, and it favours certain strategies for doing this. ‘It is not the houses,’ Fenton writes in ‘A German Requiem ...”

“... For a writer who several years ago published a ‘Manifesto Against Manifestoes’, James Fenton has published his fair share of manifestoes, including a disguised one for a ‘Martian school’ to which he did not belong. The latest, ‘Manila Manifesto’, comes as part of a package with his new book Manila Envelope ...”

“... Rouge years and eventually gained refuge in the West. Someth May’s close collaboration with James Fenton on his book was the subject of a recent BBC documentary: credit for the vivid and readable style of Cambodian Witness must go to Fenton, whose name appears on the book as its editor. Molyda Szymusiak wrote her ...”

“... child who reacts and the self-conscious father who writes poems has never been so clear. It was James Fenton who first defined the ‘Martian School’, and his brother Tom has printed, very beautifully, these Salamander books. But Fenton’s career and preoccupations have been very different from Raine’s, and his ...”

“... torpedoes. One dayclean, though, when a pouter-dove was crooling like a soft hoor, I thought how James Fenton read Shakespeare in Saigon – got the complete works in dime paperbacks on the black market. Bit by bit he’d foreground ‘the subterfugue text within the text itself’, and turn wiser – aye, much wiser – than us boneheads here. ‘It ...”

“... the bottle towards the sun until it detonated with light, my lips pursed like a trumpeter’s. James Fenton is certainly the best poet in this group. Unlike most of the others, he uses the line – uses it to seal, to repeat, to extend, to sunder. He understands that the line should be under some kind of pressure. The recent nonsense verse – most of ...”

“... Edwardian imperialism. I thought very little about him until around ten years ago, when my friend James Fenton, the poet, said that on a trip to South Korea he had been approached by a Korean professor who asked him if it was true that ‘ck’ in the name ‘Cockburn’ was not pronounced. When James asked him why he ...”

“... if you take into account what Moss calls ‘their chums from other disciplines – Clive James, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Redmond O’Hanlon’. Together, novelists and ‘chums’ are not unlike a coterie of window-cleaners crowded onto a single boatswain’s chair (or rather ...”

“... for more than twenty years and last January wrote a loopy letter to this journal, blaming James Fenton and myself for once queering his pitch at the New Statesman. ‘Effete onanist’ was one of the things he said about me. About himself he wrote with even more feeling: ‘In those days, I had no revolutionary ideology to sustain me, nothing but ...”