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
Above all, there is nothing to do in words
I have written a dozen books
to prove nothing can be done in words.
Porter does a lot in words but cannot do much about ordinary unhappiness, and this inability is a subject of many of the poems.
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