Out of Danger: Poems, by James Fenton

This is a poetry wonderfully open to experience - of foreign places, differences, feelings and languages - written by a poet who revels in verbal wit and invention, particularly in the ballad form of which James Fenton is a master. Former Vietnam war reporter and correspondent for the Independent in South-East Asia, Fenton is a traveller-poet in the tradition of W. H. Auden, the poet to whom he is most frequently compared.

Some of the poems in this collection - notably 'Jerusalem', 'Tiananmen' and 'The Manila Manifesto' - have already appeared in newspapers, journals and pamphlets; most are here made available to a wider readership for the first time. Each poem conjures a world, and all of them bear out the opinion of Peter Porter, writing in the Observer, who called Fenton 'the most talented poet of his generation'.