James Fenton (b. 1949) God, A Poem LINKS No links found. BIOGRAPHY James Fenton (b. 1949) Born in Lincoln, England, Fenton earned a B.A. (1970) from Magdalen College, Oxford University. His earliest volumes of verse appeared during his undergraduate years: Our Western Furniture (1968) and Put Thou Thy Tears Into My Bottle (1969). He wrote for the New Statesman and Nation, a leftist weekly magazine, and continued to publish relatively few but always finely crafted poems. Almost half of his collection Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1984 is light verse, but often those poems move from whimsy to horror. He won the 1984 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his poetry. He translated the lyrics of Verdi's opera Rigoletto, controversially setting the action in the 1950s New York Mafia world. He accompanied Redmond O'Hanlon on a remarkable trip to Borneo that served as the source for O'Hanlon's comic travel book Into the Heart of Borneo (1984). Children in Exile's appearance in the United States (1985) generated an enthusiastic response to the relatively unknown British poet. More recently, Fenton has published a collection of essays, The Snap Revolution (1986) and a travel book with political overtones, All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim (1988). In 1994, he was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and published Out of Danger, a collection of poetry.