Collected Poems

World Literature Today, Wntr, 2000

Peter Porter. Collected Poems. 1: 1961-1981. 2: 1984-1999. Oxford, Eng. Oxford University Press. 1999. xiv 404; xiv 384 pages. [pound]15 each; [pound]30 boxed set. isbn 0-19-288097-7; 266098-5; 288099-3 (set).

Just before axing the Oxford Poets series as insufficiently profitable, Oxford University Press published a two-volume set of Peter Porter's Collected Poems for his seventieth birthday. The new Collected Poems include his fifteen earlier volumes, from which a few poems have been deleted, and a new one, Both Ends Against the Middle, along with some previously uncollected work. Since his first Collected Poems (1983) Porter has written seven volumes. As Bruce Bennet's Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry (Oxford, 1991) ends with Possible Worlds (1989), there is a need for criticism to keep up to date, for Porter is starting to be a largely neglected major author on the international literary scene. The body of work is now immense and impressive, but not always immediately likable, as it is tonally and thematically much alike and often difficult. Taken on its own, each Porter poem gives pleasure although requiring much attention. Taken as a whole, his densely textured verse can appear daunting, the subject for a seminar rather than for reading.

Porter's essential experiences were as a child, and it is those years which keep returning to haunt the present. A religious skeptic, he dislikes the secular modern world and finds his greatest pleasures in music and other arts. It is at times difficult to know whether he is savaging religion and its institutions, or savaging a secular world without the spiritual. One of Porter's themes is the state of modern culture, and his poetry requires readers' being at home in high culture, especially history, art history, and classical music. He sees the world and himself as fallen, a place more worthy of satire than self-love. W. H. Auden was his main early model, but his tracing of personality to family life and his use of elliptical allusions lack Auden's humor. Although an heir of Auden's formalism and wit, he is more personal, skeptical, continually conscious of repressed desires. He appears a more hurt, unhappy, and armored poet, and can be self- lacerating about his own need for love. He does not fit neatly into national boundaries; an Australian who lived for decades in England, he spends much time in and writes about continental Europe; in recent years poems have increasingly been set in Australia.

The new Collected Poems offers an opportunity to look carefully at four decades of Porter's poetry, and the result for this reader is confusing. I admit I could use more critical guidance through his work, especially the later poems. The general quality is very good, but somehow the volumes blur together as too similar, and poems seem often needlessly overworked. His poems begin in prose, and as they are transformed into poetry they often feel like those Roman satirists he admires who themselves can be obscure. After the death of his wife, there are a few exceptionally warm poems, but even these are self- consciously built on poems of others. The volumes are filled with poems from the many places where he has lived, and take local places, local works of art, as the subject; but the obsessions and outlook seldom change, even in these later Australian poems where the style is more transparent, as if faced by the sources of early hurts he can address them more openly. The technique is impressive throughout the two books, but the range of music is limited, and I can sympathize with those critics who feel that after his early satiric poems about England he became too general and diffuse in his dislike of the modern world. Many of the poems are about making poetry, about the superiority of art to people.

These are necessarily a reviewer's early impressions; there is a lifetime of work here by a difficult but interesting poet, and it is going to require much more careful attention, and perhaps a body of criticism to explain it, before it can be seen clearly and judged properly.

Bruce King

Muncie, In.