Kirjahaku

Following the terrific success of Max is Missing -- winner of the Forward Prize for best poetry collection -- Peter Porter has produced another book of great power and erudition. 'Afterburner' -- the device that provides the extra thrust to a turbojet -- is a thoroughly appropriate title for this fuel-injected work. From his lengthening perspective and high vantage, no one is better placed than Porter to give these subtle meditations on art, life and the social mores - and few could manage them with such compassion and humour. Afterburner will further enhance his reputation as one of the finest poets writing in English today.

Few poets now writing share Porter’s sense of the big picture, his ability to read the small event against the waxings and wanings of culture and empire. Whether these poems look at Europe through the strata of its Golden Ages, revisit the Australia of his childhood or turn their surreal wit to the quieter domestic landscape, together they amount to a sustained meditation on the spirit that bears comparison with the late poems of Wallace Stevens. Magisterial in its perspective and possessed of a rare intellectual sanity, Max is Missing is Porter’s most charged and direct work since The Cost of Seriousness.

Satirist, philosopher, elegist, aphorist, cultural historian – Peter Porter is perhaps too singular a talent to be described as ‘representative’ of the age: an Australian whose easy familiarity with the breadth of European culture puts most Europeans to shame, he has long held the reputation of one of our most intellectually promiscuous and culturally sophisticated writers. Porter uses the poem as a means through which a thought can be pursued; this selection from fifty years’ work allows us the first opportunity to fully survey the quality and breadth of that thought, and the unfailing intensity of its light. In short, his Selected Poems is a one-volume education: Porter’s subtle and profound sense of history permits him to read any event as a point in a dynamic space where the forces of time and culture converge. From these coordinates, he gives perspective, direction and bearing to our contemporary life, and allows us to read the pattern of our ideas, art and loves on the map of an ancient terrain. That he has done all this with such immense good humour and human compassion is one of the literary miracles of our time.

Better Than God sees Porter working with a lyric engine tuned to perfection, and a mind that shows every sign of speeding up: Porter can make a song of what another writer might take an essay to cover. Whether working in the forms of epigram or narrative, or writing of memory, mortality, Renaissance intrigue or the surreal distortions of old age – Porter’s faith in poetry as a road to the truth shines through. There are few other writers for whom contemporary events throw such long shadows or for whom the past is so present, and in Better Than God one has the sense of the poet attaining an increasingly commanding height. Porter remains one of the few poets we can open anywhere, and know that we will always be both enlightened and entertained.

When Peter Porter died in 2010 his reputation as one of the greatest Australian poets had long been settled. Chorale at the Crossing gathers together the work Porter completed after the publication of his widely-praised final collection Better than God, and shows a remarkable and capacious mind - apparently furnished with half the contents of Western culture - still working at full tilt, despite the imminence of his own passing. Chorale at the Crossing contains love poems, comic excursions, and meditations on art, death, music and nature, all written with Porter's phenomenal technical facility and immense good humour. Chorale at the Crossing is the last word from one of our wisest and most compassionate poets - and is, quite simply, necessary reading.