There are no prizes for adjudicating the Australianness and the Englishness of a poet who remains, without effort, both things: fifty years domiciled in an England conceived as a lookout on Europe but the accent still unmistakable. In ‘Phar Lap In the Melbourne Museum’ Porter says ‘It is Australian innocence to love / The naturally excessive’ and part of his achievement has been to marshal the kind of purple, fly-papered in culture rhetoric of the colonial without surrendering to self-admiration or that mysticism of place which somehow annihilates the distinction between ontology and geography.

This gives Porter’s Australia the authority of ancient memory, intimately recurrent, as the years go by. We remember his images of childhood because they are never appropriated as an epical mythopoeia: the mother, dead so young, who showed him ‘how terror could fill up a room’, the ageing kindly father.

There is an aspect of Porter which is a bit like the academic poets who might like to think of themselves as his peers. He grows up, as a writer, under the shadow of Auden. He knows with Larkin that the high diction of the civilisation of Europe is tied up with the history of barbarism even as he clings to his Piero della Francescas and his Schuberts: he is more enchanted than not with the Imaginary Museum. At the same time he knows, as doctrine, the value of taking short views. The difference with Porter could be framed in terms of the question, ‘What do they know of Australia who only Australia know?’ but it would be wrong to reduce this to a literal geographical happenstance. In the end it’s probably a matter of talent and temperament but you never feel reading Porter, as you do with some fine Australian poets, that you are confronting egotistical sublimity inflating itself in the vicinity of a cultural emptiness it is terrified to acknowledge as its own.

It is characteristic of Peter Porter that his poetic debate with Les Murray (about whom, God knows, there is nothing academic) should have had its first expression in something so kindly and quizzical and casual. ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’, the poem which initiates it, is a title that intimates its own – anti-sublime – story with a bemused sense of wonder. The Elizabethan Works and Days is presented, in good faith, as an image of country Australia and of one Australia, Les Murray’s, that has apotheosised the mysticism of the country in ways which are both singular and typical; the world of the ‘Taree smallholder splitting logs / And philosophising on his dangling billies’. It’s an unforgettable summing up, fortuitously arrived at, lacking all dogma: ‘A long-winded, emphatic, kelpie yapping / About our land / our time, our fate, our strange / And singular ways of moons and showers, lakes.’

Les Murray is, of course, the defining opposite in the case of Porter, a face as Australian as the face of a Dobell, the face of Boeotia and the one Australian poet who might be thought of as Porter’s superior and who has in any case carried an opposite aesthetic to the point of transfiguration, however much he has stumbled or parodied himself or lapsed from taste or grace. Murray arguably is the most gifted poet ever to write in or of this country. But with Porter there is something that looks like more than a gift, something graver and less grand, which surfaces unmistakably (though it has been implicit throughout) in the poems that follow the death of his first wife and surface in ‘The Cost of Seriousness’. Here, in full, is ‘Non Piangere, Liù’ (the title is from Porter’s beloved Turandot):

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.

Other things still come –
invoices, subscription renewals,
shiny plastic cards promising credit –

not much for a life spent
in the service of reality.

You need answer none of them.
Nor my asking you for one drop
of succour in my own hell.

Do not cry, I tell myself,
the whole thing is a comedy
and comedies end happily.

The fire will come out of the sun
and I shall look in the heart of it.

This seems to me some of the greatest poetry we have had in the last half century – great by any standards, not just those of Australian or British poetry. If you wanted to demonstrate to a room of sceptics or schoolchildren what could be done with poetry, what poetry could express which was not trivial or decorative or neat you could do worse than turn to a poem like this or ‘An Exequy’ or ‘Good Ghost, Gaunt Ghost’ from English Subtitles (‘She is coming towards me, / looking to turn me into stone’) or Porter’s ‘Quod Scripsi’ poem:

It is the little stone of unhappiness
which I keep with me. I had it as a child
and put it in a drawer …
                       These words
I take from my religious instruction
complete responsibility –
let them be entered in the record,
What I have written I have written.

Peter Porter’s friend, the poet and critic Evan Jones, wrote with great insight about these poems when he said that the remarkable thing about them was not just the evocation of grief but the poet’s refusal to be in any way exalted by his suffering. Porter himself is as sceptical of any view of poetry as unmediated self-expression as he is of self-referential poststructuralist burble or anything else which would throw out the subject matter. But poetry, he says, with characteristic earthiness, is never there when the sore is picked.

In any case, it would be wrong to think of the tragedy which surfaces in some of Porter’s greatest work as some negative ‘gift’ like the Gulags or enjoying the artistic privilege of life under Hitler or Stalin. Porter said, modestly enough, that his wife’s death had led to a creative surge. But, as the novelist Joyce Carol Oates said recently, any life abounds in incident and drama and a world of potential material.

The most remarkable thing about Porter is that he has written this disjointed series of poems about grief which will bear comparison with the great sequence by Hardy or with the poems of Celan and he has at the same time remained a gregarious, talky, occasional poet, waffling about culture and sniping about politics, evoking the sadness of childhood memory and constantly making jokes, good, bad, and elegiac. This Collected Poems is a wonderfully companionable brace of volumes, nearly 800 pages all up, which has the disconcerting enchantment of a great letter writer or diarist who is also a matchless craftsman with plenty of self-deprecation and a passion for the details of high culture, mundane life, and the depressions and distractions of the everyday. These poems which range from elegant, cloak trailing translations of Martial, (self-consciously the voice of the postcolonial at the rotten heart of an empire down at heels) through the incidental, half-glimpsed details of marriage, affairs, children, writing, childhood memory in tropical sunlight and shadows, the blight of school, the omnipresence of death, the full richness and boarding resonance of the iconography and music of religion in the absence of faith, but with an openness to any still small voice worth the listening.

You could track, if you like, not the genius of Porter’s poetry but its grandness and humanity, its pathos and humour, by looking at nothing but the poems he has written about cats. There is ‘The King of the Cats is Dead’ written in a style Celtic ballyhoo that must have made the Heaneys and Hugheses blanch, there is the poem where the cats aggressive stroking becomes hateful and the one in which the cat comes to stand for every oppressed minority that has ever lived (one of the great politico-allegorical poems of our time); there are the musical cats, the cats compared to Smart’s cat Jeoffroy, the grand dancing cats; there is ‘Still Life with Cats’ and ‘Death and the Moggie’, a title only Porter would be capable of. There is his celebration of ‘The Cats of Campagnatico’ ‘Which are never fully grown and have never / Been kittens … Thin and cared for, / Fat and neglected, watchful and hardly seen awake / Cool-haired in the sun and warm in shadow’. There is a marvellous elegy, light as air, to his cat Claudius.

Peter Porter’s Collected ends with his latest volume, Both Ends Against the Middle. It is a moody continuation in a familiar vein: witty and woebegone, wistful and rapt. There are formalities which cadence feeling: a daughter’s present ‘wills the hapless words to say / Between ruled lines that hearts will break’ and casual jokes, ‘The poetry we say makes nothing happen / Is being interrupted in my flat by Sondheim tapes.’ It ends, in great elegance, with a homage to the German tradition of lyric and song, the world of Schubert and Heine and Goethe, translations as hushed and grave as Porter’s Martial was brash and smart.

Peter Porter’s new Collected is a magnificent book. It is a book full of everything the sun shines upon, everything on which the rain falls. The memory of a wife, now dead, taking a cat, also passed on, to the vet. An uncharacteristically tender memory of affection in a boarding school shelter shed. The face of Dante and the words of Shakespeare. This, to a pretty dazzling extent, is a poet’s book, which contains the world. Like few enough books written in verse, it will nourish and enlighten the general reader. It is a sad, funny, sophisticated, and down to earth collection of rhymes and plaints and observations. However hooked on history or enamoured of fiction you may be, its music and wisdom will get to you.