There are few poets who can successfully, with both dignity and intelligence, bridge the vertiginous gap between poetic reality and the demands of the commercial. Dorothy Porter has done so admirably for over two decades. For many, she has heralded a new way forward as the cartographer of that gap and instructor on how we might cross it with our poetic integrity intact. The success of The Monkey’s Mask, in particular, marked a watershed in contemporary Australian poetry. It made things clear – smart, passionate and well-crafted verse could be well published and very widely read. And it couldn’t have worked without Dorothy’s years of writing, reading and publishing equally smart and well-crafted books that were noted for their tensile, imagistically lucent and psychically condensed sense of line, the best moments of which could remind one of Bashô, or the Russian Acmeists. As she wrote in her excellent first volume, Little Hoodlum, ‘not even/a missile/wrought from sky’s/own metal/could bring down/a bilingual sparrow – /in premeditated crime /I unhood/a shrewd/predatory poem’. Contributions to reality, indeed.

It’s a considerable shame, then, that her new collection of poems is so disappointing. Following the success of her last decade, now would have been the ideal time for Dorothy Porter to prove that she had consolidated her grasp of craft, passion. and wit, and could write distinctive poems which, to paraphrase Akhmatova, with shrewd appraising eyes could stand as witness to the common lot. In Other Worlds, we witness nothing so certain. As we are told in the collection’s first poem ‘Comets’:

There’s a white-blue nerve burning across my night sky
I wish it hurt to watch
because then
I might stop.

There is an astonishing frequency in this collection with which practised lucidity leaps nervelessly into blandness. Individual poems suffer from a relentless flatness of tone which, when combined with the one-dimensionality of their thought, reflection and feeling, causes the collection to read like a series of quickly sketched picaresque vignettes from a Good Weekend gone devilishly askew.

The book has not been well conceived or edited. Perhaps Porter, like her readers, has been let down by her publisher. One can only speculate as to why some poems are present. Take, for example, the following extract from ‘Torch Song for Sydney’, which was ‘commissioned by the City of Sydney for the arrival of the Olympic Torch on 14 September 2000’:

… Tonight a flame will flare like a swimmer
off the blocks,
burn
like the lungs
of a marathon runner,
at the hearth
of our glittering city …
we welcome bright fire that has run like a song line through this fierce
and sacred land
passed as a spirit-torch glittering
from hand to hand.

Embarrassingly sentimental, clumsy in its lineation and imagery, and frankly embracing a dubiously constructed and highly affected nationalism, poems such as this reduce experience to a set of aesthetic, political and ethical categories limited to a small range of white middleclass hopes and anxieties. Maybe this is where poetry as an art rests these days. For some. In ‘everything becomes mysterious’, a poem dedicated to Rilke, Porter asks ‘is mystery as hard won / as self-knowledge? // those eerily lovely / ethane moments / when you’re utterly comfortable …’ The reader might well ask whether anything is as hard won as the ironic.

Fundamentally, the poems in Other Worlds do not benefit from being part of the kind of sustained, and sustaining, narrative telos that formed the body and spirit of Porter’s successful verse novels. Their post-Romantic, almost gothic drive and shape provided her with plenty of room to explore deep mythic and psychic tropes in a complex and engaging manner, the effects of which were doubled by the precision of image afforded by her accomplished linguistic plasticity. There was always a larger purpose at work, and the reader could happily take part. The poems in Other Worlds, to the contrary, lie scattered like enigmatic allegories in empty space. When, in ‘Poet in Medellin’, the poet asks ‘On the leper’s waving stump/is a dab of white ointment. //Is it a potion from a lizard/to make his limb grow back?’, we are not being prompted to feel or think, or to observe any such feeling in the text beyond the specular. The words remain ethically obtuse and flat in their emotional affect. Equally worrying is that the mythic tenor of her earlier work has been dumbed down to a handful of material spectres which, like the recurrent motifs of extraplanetary and earthly, bodily obsession and possession, are conceits that feel dull for remaining abstract and unexplored. In essence, Porter’s desire for making sense of self and world, of other selves or of other worlds, rarely coincides with her language.

Two more examples. In ‘Faith’: ‘I’ve lived a life/illuminated and/choked/by dreaming // sometimes everything / threads together / in a lightning charred / tapestry / almost too exciting / to contemplate / let alone live with … but best of all / dreaming/has left a dusting/of memory mushed images.’ Or in ‘Kaua’i’: ‘this is paradise. / slightly pissed. / watching the sea and the mountain/moving in and out / through the mist/like our own strange souls.’ While we might seek through such poetry-workshop-style allegorical mist for something less plain than the literal, we are confronted, over and over, by the fact that mist is, well, just mist.

At a cover price of almost $30, Other Worlds is a tour deforce of missed opportunities. The Pan Macmillan inhouse trade documentation for Other Worlds proclaims that ‘Dorothy’s poetry sells!’, yet it is notable that the publisher has made only a half-hearted job of its production. The contents page is inadequate, listing only section headings, and the paper stock is cheap. While I agree that the proliferation of poetry in the marketplace can only be good – one can have no issue with good poetry being widely read in well produced volumes – it’s worth remembering that such ‘contributions to reality’ are meant to sustain poetry’s being in this world. Hopefully, Other Worlds is an aberration for Dorothy Porter, and that, to look back again to Little Hoodlum, her ‘poem[s] / could be keeper / to a phoenix.’