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...
Peter Porter might be described, unkindly, as another, younger, quirkier, brighter Betjeman. Certainly his verse is marred by the same jocose, inapposite cleverness…. He is not always … offensive [in Preaching to the Converted], he is often merely glib, and fancy: "I've never been on Ulysses' island / or on Isherwood's"; "God is a Super-Director / who's terribly good at crowd scenes, / but He has only one tense, the present." I take it th...
Peter Porter's poems have always represented the authority of the articulate and hallowed. A disturbing sanity has been at the centre of his work. Concern for cultural values and the dilemmas of metropolitan life has not led to whatever ossified styles "new geniuses" might have expected from him. Porter is a man of at least two artistic temperaments. Culturally he is conservative; artistically he is adventurous, and though his staple is simplified baroque, it has been seen capable of ta...
Peter Porter has always been, to put it mildly, interested in death: in his earlier collections he frequently reflected upon the deaths of others or contemplated his own, and even in his lighter poems death was always ready to sidle in among the lines of pointed social commentary and the mosaics of multi-cultural allusion. Now in this fine new collection [The Cost of Seriousness] death is at the centre. It is difficult to say it without sounding callous, but it needs somehow to be said: the death of his wif...
In Peter Porter's The Cost of Seriousness, language is not a vast element with which the poet contends, but a game rhetoric forces him to play. In this book it is also a faith that has failed. If the subject of Porter's poems is the death of his wife, their recurring theme is disillusionment with 'the lying art'…. Porter has always been an erudite poet, and in this book (much his best) as in earlier ones, the safety net is expertly displayed—even when he attacks poe...
