Where was I and what then happened
to me
When half-light moved beyond eclipse?
Didn’t I foresee the end, and you agree
Love is the clumsiest of partnerships?

And would you wish to hear me speak
to you
Of irretrievable darkness by the sea;
Of happiness too far off to travel to
And in some narrow space a leafless tree?

That sense of the overpowering weight of loss that nevertheless is borne, that sense of abiding with the pain of who we are and the love that is inseparable from everything we can name (and hence with the high and mighty art of poetry), which shows when the poet is true to his deepest self and leaves no room for bragging, no room for anything but feeling – isn’t this the quality that makes us know that Peter Porter not only had one of the most exceptional gifts of anyone in Australian history who ever tried his hand at writing poetry, but that he went further with it, that he was deeper and truer than any of them?

The sound of speech, the voice of sense
on earth,
In this adjunct seems carpentered of
years.
My richness now is nothing but a dearth
Of tricks for the wiping-away of tears.

Moving further, may I find again
The nub of things we shared – the
bridal face
Whose hurt if mine was not mine to
explain
But made to seem a human common-
place?

What do we notice about this? The sense of loss at the heart of love, that ‘bridal face’ inseparable from a ‘hurt’ that was not simply a personal possession, but a shared thing, an intimate thing in common between those who have and hold for richer and for poorer.

What we hear so clearly in this late great poem of Porter is the tone, grave and unshowy, music yielding no rhetoric of reverberation, that we hear in the poems of his that will last as long as the language as we know it, the poems that Porter wrote after the death of his first wife. What was the phrase Eliot used towards the end of Four Quartets – something about a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. Peter Porter had it in spades: it was the precondition of his greatest poetry, and it seems that one of the incidental things it cost him was the sacrifice of the kind of vanity that can so easily go with the poetic gift in an age of lyrical ramblings and randomness, a highly developed capacity for the verbal acrobatics of self-admiration.

Porter would, of course, have denied any such claims to poetic sanctity, but anyone who knew him or reads him would know about this modesty, which was inseparable from his fineness, the form his aesthetic took and the moral basis of his integrity as an artist. One way of putting this is to say he had so little of the journalist and the academic in him (bearing in mind Patrick White’s stricture that among Australians such intellectual life as there is belongs to the hack and the schoolteacher). In the end, Porter lacked the vices of both these creatures, even though he made a living as a literary journalist, and was as both a poet and a man comprehensively erudite.

Returning to this last poem of Porter’s, which is both intimately familiar in its antecedents (no one but the man who wrote The Cost of Seriousness [1978] could write like that) and astonishing in its formal power – the way in which the technique seems to release the summation of a lifetime’s experience – we are also jolted by the sense of how Porter’s end recalls his beginning.

With looking upwards in my power
And being forced to seek the stars on
earth,
In this exacting planisphere I cower:
I have not moved one footstep from
my birth.

It is partly the exactitude of the rhymes – an inevitability with nothing fortuitous and cheap about them – that brings to mind that tonally very different poem with which the early Porter trailed his cloak and demonstrated that there was a lot more to his talent than cloak-trailing. Remember the Porter who wrote, ‘I am only the image I can force upon the town’? Remember the not quite swaggering dandy of ‘John Marston Advises Anger’: ‘All the boys are howling to take the girls to bed. / Our betters say it’s a seedy world ...’

One of the things most obvious about Porter from the outset was his ear for dramatic effect. Given that he is not what we think of as a histrionic poet – more Herbert-like understatement than Donne-like brio and braggadocio, as Peter Steele might say – it is easy to forget the boy in Queensland who belonged to Elizabethan play reading groups, or the chap in London who knew Christopher Fry and adored Shaw and was a great frequenter of plays. Paul Scofield, Porter once told me, wrote to him to express his admiration for his work. It is not hard to see why the greatest British actor of his generation, a notably unflashy artist, should have realised the depth of the dramatic realisation in the great Porter poems.

A card comes to tell you
you should report
to have your eyes tested.

But your eyes melted in the fire
and the only tears, which soon dried,
fell in the chapel.

‘Non Piangere Liù’, from which these lines are drawn, is not only one of the greatest poems ever written by an Australian: it is also part of a sequence that represents one of the major achievements in English language poetry in the last half-century.

In wet May, the months of change,
In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange
Dreams pursue me in my sleep,
Black creatures of the upper deep –
Though you are five months dead, I see
You in guilt’s iconography,
Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered
child ...
(‘An Exequy’)

Porter admitted that the experience of loss these pains came from nonetheless gave him an extraordinary poetic empowerment, which allowed him to dramatise something real and terrible. Another way of putting this is to say that the subject thrust upon him by his first wife’s suicide gave him an objective correlative for the melancholy that had always fretted and would always fret around the edges of his poetry. That’s too cold a way of putting it, but there is no doubting the grandeur of the achievement. Porter’s elegies will stand comparison with Hopkins’s tragic sonnets in their impassioned wrestling with the demons of memory, in the reckless and scathing brilliance of their technique, and in the testamental authority with which they render grief and dispossession, and the impulse to preserve the reality of what has been suffered and the sacredness of what has been lost.

They are intensely dramatic poems without being remotely actorly. It is as if the long apprenticeship in the craft of poetry, in making verse from every incidental inflection of a life filled with concerts and Italian contemplations and cats – an occasional poet’s life – had prepared Porter for this rebegetting of ‘absence, darkness, death, things which are not’.

You asked in an uncharacteristic note,
‘Dwell I but in the suburbs
of your good pleasure?’

I replied, ‘To us has been allowed
the easiest room in hell.’
Once it belonged to you,
now it is only mine.
(‘The Easiest Room in Hell’)

The drama is partly in the way these poems are like the lost anthology pieces from an unspeakable tragedy, as though they recapitulated the logic of the purple passages in those minor Jacobean masterpieces that T.S. Eliot was to ape with such a reverberating sense of dislocation. Except that in Porter, although the detail of the references can be obscure (there is the endearing inability to realise that knowledge may be arcane), the central emotion is always crystal clear. Take the hard-worked for wisdom of ‘What I Have Written I Have Written’.

It is the little stone of unhappiness
which I keep with me. I had it as a child
and put it in a drawer. There came
a heap of paper to put beside it,
letters, poems, a brittle dust
of affection, sallowed by memory
....I gave the stone to a woman
and it glowed. I set my mind
to hydraulic work, lifting words
from their swamp. In the light from
the stone
her face was bloated. When she died
the stone returned to me, a present
from reality ...

It is as if everything that might have been prosy or garrulously discursive in Porter, everything that feeds into the rich and original proliferation of the occasional poems, has found its focus. Of course, this is simply another way of saying that with Porter there is always more in the small poems, the ones that joke and notate, that burble about art and racehorses, than meets the eye. One of the extraordinary things about Peter Porter, one of the things that make him look like that improbable thing, a major poet, is the way he is not, in the ordinary sense, in love with the sound of his own voice.

This doesn’t for a moment stop him from writing the kind of one-off poems that have dominated the world since the later Auden made an art of them, but it does mean that Porter, more than most of his confrères, is always alive to the element of art – not least when the treatment is overtly light. Think of that wonderful poem no one ever forgets ‘Mort aux chats’ – so oddly moving when we heard the recording of it by Peter Porter himself in the Newman Chapel – outlining the vices of cats. Why is it one of the better joke poems of the last fifty years? Is it because the invective against themogsis like the rain of rhetoric that falls on Jews and Muslims and whichever undesirables a loud voice decides to derogate. Well, yes, but so obviously that it is a bit ponderous to point this out, not least when the speaker ends up calling for the Rule of the Dog to last a thousand years. It is more that this bit of fluff of a poem is so purely funny, so purely silly that it remains the unforgettable gag it is. The poem is also clearly the work of a cat lover; the fleet grace and imperiousness of the feline governs every detail of the impotent catalogue of cats’ vices.

Peter Porter forsook a life of writing advertising copy that might have made him financially comfortable, but he had a command of tone and an ability to deliver a joke which was that of the born writer, not, in the restricting sense, of the poet. He was in that sense much closer to Keats’s dictum that the poet was the least poetical thing in nature, though this was doubly misleading in Porter’s case, because he was so in love with art and music, so willing to let the references to them rip in his poetry, that he could sometimes look flauntingly obscure to the point of academicism. (I suspect he thought half the time that any reference that he could put in a poem would stick out a mile to anyone who had the university education he lacked.) In fact he was profoundly learned, a good example of the autodidact who does the job of education far more thoroughly than a rash of ancient universities ever could. And that erudition is there – yes, like so much garlic and sapphires in the mud – throughout this spacious and sparkling Selected Poems, which was compiled as the poet was dying and comes now like a concentrated gift of gold in the wake of his death.

There is something preposterous about a Selected Poems that runs to more than four hundred pages. The Rest on the Flight is more like a Portable Porter than anything else: it’s not really true that it collects or concentrates everything worth preserving, because Porter was such a consistently good poet that the choices here can sometimes seem arbitrary, though not errant. It is certainly a volume which would reward any summer’s investment for anyone who wanted the real thing in a world of pastime and preoccupation. And the reader who needs to refresh her memory of Porter will be pleased to find familiar anthology pieces such as ‘Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum’ (‘It is Australian innocence to love / The naturally excessive and be proud / Of a broad-limbed chestnut bay gelding who ran fast’) or ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’ (‘... there I saw, not quite / The view from Darien but something strange / And balking – Australia, my own country / And its edgy managers ...’

That latter poem goes on to talk about a ‘Taree smallholder’, and inevitably raises the spectre of Les Murray, such a looming presence in the poetry stakes.

Ironically, no one ever carried on about Peter Porter in terms of the endless chatter about Nobel Prizes for Australia. This is partly because he was so unambiguously an adoptive Londoner that the Australia that still shaped his speech and that he regularly visited in the last thirty-five years of his life was almost, not quite, a fiction that he wore by way of courtesy. Robert Hughes said once that Australia was a ‘fame brothel’ for the expatriate. It is true that Peter Porter was a famous Australian poet; but he was quite simply an English poet and will be remembered among them. On the strength of this volume alone he would have been among the worthier Nobel Prize winners, if any team of lobbyists had ever gone in to bat for him. Peter Porter is a profoundly satisfying poet, even at his quietest and most occasional. He always has something to say, and he has the matchless technique of a poet who can bend and twist himself into prosiness when the occasion makes its demand.

This is not to deny the insight of Evan Jones, writing in Scripsi in the 1980s, that there were two Porters: one a great master of the music of poetry, the other cloth-eared and talky. Of course there were. What is remarkable about Porter is that he managed to be both kinds of poet at once, and to be in his way as accomplished at the lower burble as he was at the higher kind. The latter, of course, is what we hear in the great poetry, though only a poet with such an eye for the succinctness of the mundane could have written Porter’s versions of Martial. It is also the depth of Porter’s culture, and the way he could use it with an effect of dazzling lucidity, that we hear in ‘To Himself’, which Porter described as ‘a working’ of that untranslatable poet, Leopardi.

My exhausted heart
It is time for you to rest.
The final deceit is over, the one
I thought would last for ever.
It is dead, this love is dead
and I am content that with it
dies all hope of fond illusions
and any real desire to harbour them.

This has a magnificent austerity. In it you hear the leanness of pure language and of an art that can master the simple statement.

Throughout this long backward sweep of Porter’s long, spacious life’s work, with the accumulation of its wisdom, full of the record of every foible and folly but with a massively articulated enthusiasm brimming from the merest occasions and with plenty of the gravest and saddest things in the world, you carry away a remarkably full apprehension of the sensibility of a man at once mild and pensive, who was also capable of some of the most scarifying examinations of heartbreak we have.

It is strange in the late poems how the forgotten aperçus hit the eye: ‘Home we know is in the head’, ‘a philosopher feels on his creek / the tears whereof he cannot speak ...’, ‘my childhood, such a provincial world to be born into ...’ The provincial world from which Porter fled, and the still provincial world that continues to treasure him as a countryman, might ponder his tribute, if that’s the word, to Rochester.

A bully, fiend and alcoholic,
A brilliant Hobbesean melancholic,
A frightened sinner, parabolic,
Yet first and foremost
A mind which rendered apostolic
Sad Reason’s ghost.

Listen to that clatter of clacking repetitions, all but miming a drunk’s reiterations, and then – like a miracle – that swerve into ‘Sad Reason’s ghost’. And we scarcely notice the learning behind the neoclassical capitals.

Well, there aren’t many poets in the history of the world who could get such music and such radiance out of sad reason’s ghost.