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Eighteen Poems by Peter Porter
(Shoestring Press, £5.00) 29pp.
Available from www.shoestringpress.co.uk

Readers could be forgiven for assuming that the prolific Australian poet Peter Porter doesn’t so much write as think in poems, and with a two-volume Collected and several more recent Picador collections under his belt already, his output has become one of those towering, Victorian-scaled edifices that offers readers a lifetime’s worth of exploration - a St Pancras Hotel of the mind. Porter consciously lifts the title of Dylan Thomas’ debut for this slim but substantial pamphlet, whose poems often reflect on the lives and works of other artists. The Earl of Rochester – recently flattered with a screen portrayal by Johnny Depp - contributes fragments to the opening poem, in which Porter meditates on notions of sin and redemption, finding in Rochester’s “twelve light lines…debates both magisterial and odd”. ‘Magisterial and odd’ seems as good a description of his own strategy in the poems that follow, locating “the ordinary of mystic states” in ‘The Rothko Room, Tate Modern’, musing on ‘Henry James and Constipation’ as one voluntary exile who has “eaten Europe” and needs to “digest it well” to another, and dramatising an exchange between ‘Money And Stravinsky’ , in which the composer declares “if evil has a root then music must/ As life’s most abstract shoot acknowledge it./ The wind sweeps past the Steppes and still the dust/ Blows to the Neva; the fittest serve the fit”. Ideas recur and reflect between the various poems, as Rome, Art, music, science, divinity and death give an impression of a mind like a hall of mirrors in which the most obscurely erudite of subjects cast sudden, unexpected light on the most mundane and pressing of topical themes. “Though I walk in the Valley of the Shadow of Death/ I will fear only the metaphors of fear” he notes in ‘Glumdalclitch’s Cleavage’, before closing, in ‘Because We Can’, with an abrupt slap to our resignation before the failures of current democracy as potent as Auden’s notes on similar issues in the 1930s: “Is this our excuse/ That we are very small/ Among demagogues whose job is to choose/ The Few’s good, or the Good of All?”; “Oh come off it -/ It’s only profit,/ One of our boasts,/ Free Will for Man!/ We bitumen the fields and flood the coasts/ Because we must because we can”.