Peter Porter is often described as an Australian poet living in London. The insistence on his Australian origins may seem odd considering that he sailed to England in 1951 when he was twenty-two, and, except for visits to his homeland at different...

Peter Porter is a poet of unrest. Because this unrest is often moral and sometimes metaphysical, his writing has a prophetic quality rare in contemporary poetry. In the first decade of his career, Porter was a Hamlet raging at the world, seeing...

Porter is riotous, prolific. Fond of baroque, he is really a mannerist—that style which isn't a style but a near-chaos of old habits and new fashions fighting for life in an attempt at glory. He often refers to the period:

          Perhaps it did happen,
          the Renaissance, when even the maggots
     ...

Peter Porter's poems on the death of his wife, where the agonising minutiae—the appointment card from an optician, other mail after she's dead—are presented in all their nakedness [in The Cost of Seriousness]. He makes Gertrude Stein say:

         Nothing can be done in the face
         of ordinary unhappiness
    ...

[The Cost of Seriousness] is important in what it attempts, and important for Porter, I should imagine—not just because of the more intimate and painful area of experience on which many poems draw, but because he has cut out so much of the clutter of cleverness which lumbered previous volumes. The cost of seriousness is not, as Porter writes in his title poem, 'death', but emotional pain; and the pain in these poems extends beyond the poems directly mourning his wife, and reaches into t...