Collected Poems: 1961-81 v. 1 (Oxford Poets) Book

Peter Porter is a Grand Old Man of English poetry (or poetry in English, one should perhaps say) and on his seventieth birthday has brought forth his collected poems in two huge volumes, presented together in an elegant slip-case. It would be hard enough to sum up Porter's works even if he were finished with writing, but a note at the end of the second volume archly gives thanks for a grant received "at such a crucial stage in my career as a writer". Porter is prolific, certainly, and has also proved himself versatile, as generous and catholic in his own creative work as he has been in his reviews over the past few decades. An expatriate and autodidact from Australia who has, like many with similar origins, digested more of Europe's culture than many Europeans, his poetry has ranged through racy satires of 1960s London, scabrous versions of the poems of Martial, poems on Auschwitz and the Cold War, hauntingly tender and self-critical elegies for his first wife, who committed suicide, and elegant meditations on art, love, death and sex. His references are equally broad, from low culture to high and his narrative voices flicker between gravitas and rumbustious play. These volumes contain all his published volumes and even sneak in a wholly new book's worth of pieces, Both Ends Against the Middle; one suspects that if Oxford had for any reason delayed publication, they'd have run the risk that Porter would write yet another. Porter increasingly looks like one of the most significant poets of the 1960s and 1970s, even though unfashionable in his intellectual and aesthetic enthusiasms ("I consider it / my duty to be old hat / so you can hate me", he wrote nearly 30 years ago). The treasures here--witty, beautifully phrased and formed, ultimately moving--are numerous. In "What I Have Written I Have Written", he talks of "the little stone of unhappiness" that makes him write; this bold refusal to disown his work is made manifest in this publication. And rightly so; these volumes are a fitting milestone for a man who has been Stoic in his grief and big-hearted in his enthusiasms. No poetry collection is complete without these books. --Robert PottsRead More