Disguise that hides a hard punch

It is 50 years since Peter Porter arrived in ‘rain-veiled Tilbury’ from his native Australia. ‘I came, I saw, I conjured,’ is how he summarises his career. Death haunts this collection from first to last. The opening poem uses the sea as a metaphor for existence. Its initial line, ‘The engine dies,’ is both a reference to a stalling boat and a symbol of mortality. He approaches the inevitable head-on. ‘Within this calm,’ he muses quietly, ‘something is now to be.’ Directness is only one of Porter’s virtues. ‘Sex and the Over-Seventies’ is a straightforward comic elegy for the wasted energies of youth. Ardour has cooled to the point where ‘the bodies cease to rhyme’ and ageing couples obey the mental instruction to ‘keep talking to avoid going upstairs together’. He is equally at home with the oblique and the allusive, never letting his verse be tied to a single meaning.