Disguise that hides a hard punch

It is 50 years since Peter Porter arrived in ‘rain-veiled Tilbury’ from his native Australia. ‘I came, I saw, I conjured,’ is how he summarises his career. Death haunts this collection from first to last. The opening poem uses the sea as a metaphor for existence. Its initial line, ‘The engine dies,’ is both a reference to a stalling boat and a symbol of mortality. He approaches the inevitable head-on. ‘Within this calm,’ he muses quietly, ‘something is now to be.’ Directness is only one of Porter’s virtues. ‘Sex and the Over-Seventies’ is a straightforward comic elegy for the wasted energies of youth. Ardour has cooled to the point where ‘the bodies cease to rhyme’ and ageing couples obey the mental instruction to ‘keep talking to avoid going upstairs together’. He is equally at home with the oblique and the allusive, never letting his verse be tied to a single meaning. In re- evaluating Raphael, about whose virtues he has changed his mind several times, he says:

A richness in right places, a saturation,
And nothing extemporised or dandified,
Almost a closing down of disappointment.

In its context this stanza leaves us uncertain whether it analyses Raphael’s technique or offers the world-view of an ageing writer. For Porter ambiguity is less a technical feat than a creative instinct. He does it everywhere. His cultural scope is immense, his erudition at times acrobatic, but his is a merciful sort of learning, the kind that shares rather than parades its possessions. His voice is informed by a lifelong political liberalism. Even at his most cutting, he is gentle with the knife. ‘Who was it led us to overestimate the New?’ he asks in a beautifully balanced satire on a writer whom he identifies sardonically as ‘The Greatest Living Poet’.