Picador £8.99 pp74

Peter Porter’s new book, the second since Collected Poems (1999), marks the 50th anniversary of his arrival in England on a boat from Australia, young, unpublished and hopeful. In February this year, he celebrated his 75th birthday with something he would not have predicted back then: a three-day seminar convened by scholars, critics and fellow-poets to study and acclaim his achievement. Yet the mantle of tranquil seniority, which often weaves into its fabric of respect a thread or two implying that a writer’s best time has passed, refuses to descend on him.

Porter continues to be a vigorous presence in poetry circles. Afterburner is his 17th volume and, despite a title poem speaking of “the glow at the tail-end of my life”, his verse is as energetic, exuberantly learned and, to use an unfashionable word, as serious as ever. Poems such as Why Are We Waiting? and The Jews in the Ice are as good as anything he has written; as is Sex and the Over-Seventies: “It’s late and you and your body / are alone — keep talking, to delay / having to go upstairs together.”

The hint of darker moods behind the confident erudition and the excellent jokes has always been there in his poetry. But today it’s less unnerving and death itself is treated in a more resigned fashion. The family goldfish has died, commemorated in a vein that might have pleased William Cowper; a dynasty of cats has gently passed on. Personal death could be like a last wave carrying us to a breakwater, or a “light already low, and perhaps goldening”.

As always, there are plenty of antidotes, sometimes in poems with punning titles like Komikaze, or Drinking Gavi with Gavin. In the latter, he remembers his dead friend the poet Gavin Ewart with poignant affection. Theirs was “a shy fruitful friendship to end a dour century — / Sincere admiration, yes, probably — certainly / On my part a love of your lewd virtuosity.” And the familiar flair for up-to-date anger has not weakened. Harsh memories of his rag-trade father coincide with “Donald Rumsfeld’s face on the box. / Business appointing Murder to the Board.”

In a poem called Fifty Years on, Porter remembers how he arrived five decades ago seeking “a London which was in me from the start”. A sense of affinity with English culture in general helped a writer of his abundant talent to establish himself quite quickly as one of the best English poets working in the second half of the last century. It also provided the springboard for a leap into European art, music and literature, his profound appreciation and knowledge of which is as crucial as ever to his work. He employs it to add grave weight to pieces such as Clear Air Turbulence, and humour to his mischievous Seminar Scratchcards: “Christ, Jeremy Bentham and Schönberg had disciples: Mozart had an audience.” It seems natural that, in his poems, Porter un-self-consciously features Horace, whom he praises warmly, Dante, Michelangelo, Swift, Nietzsche — even Rimbaud, a poet most unlike Porter but redeemed by his rebellion against the limitations of French culture. Or that he should call to his aid maxims of Francis Bacon about death, of Pascal about human relationships, of Wittgenstein about wealth.

But it is fair to admit that the arguments of the later poems have become increasingly complex. This is sometimes a case of strict adherence to a chosen form (his rhyming couplets render a promising poem such as The Man Who Spoke in Tongues laconic and baffling) and happens sometimes because of the eager excitement with which he leaps from one perception to another. It makes some of his work, to use a phrase too often applied to writers who do not deserve it, difficult yet rewarding.

So the poems are often intricate as well as rich, asking time and devotion for full understanding; but, on the other hand, his devotion to the craft of poetry should call that out from his readers. I recall expressing “sincere admiration” for Porter’s first Collected Poems in 1983 because of its eloquent and honest concern with the fate of art and civilisation in our time. Twenty years later, that continues to be his principal theme. He addresses it in one of the most intelligently entertaining and challenging voices in modern poetry.

Sleeping with the Alphabet

You glorious twenty-six, not equal
In purport, short straws of words,
Come with me in the night-time squall,
My hurricane of verbs.

My chiefest pegs to hang fear on —
Don’t think it’s only sights
Which dreams call up — Wordsong
Lingers in the tucks and sweats.

Sounds of pre-performance, cries
Subsumed in nothingness,
Hoping to syllabicize
Themselves as messages?

The A of Anger, E of Death,
An I who might not be myself
And O the deadly wind that bloweth
Unto U, my vowel of Truth

Peter Porter

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