Peter Porter

Peter Porter’s collection Dragons in Their Pleasant Palaces came out in 1997.

Poem: ‘The Cast of Campagnatico’

Peter Porter, 1 April 1982

Since a harebrained devil has changed the world To scenes from a Nature Documentary, There are those of us who will forever seek Rational landscapes, dotted with walled cemeteries, Unquestioned rivers of familiar fords And an efficient bus from which adulteresses Alight before the ascent to the neighbour village. Not that His blocked thumb is absent: those English families tooting along the...

Bad Dreams: Peter Porter

Robert Crawford, 6 October 2011

One of the greatest elegies of the 20th century was written in a flat-roofed Australian beach house beside scribbly-gums and banksias in 1975. The poem and the circumstances out of which it grew...

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Davie’s Rap

Neil Corcoran, 25 January 1990

One of the finest things in Donald Davie’s Under Briggflatts is a sustained, learned and densely implicative comparison of two poems about horses: Edwin Muir’s well-known,...

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Callaloo

Robert Crawford, 20 April 1989

‘Where do you come from?’ asks one of the most important questions in contemporary poetry – where’s home? Answering the pulls and torsions of that question produces much...

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Every three years

Blake Morrison, 3 March 1988

Now that poetry has been brought into the marketplace, and publishers have discovered how to make a modest profit from it, and now that publication outlets can be found in any good-sized store,...

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Players, please

Jonathan Bate, 6 December 1984

The Great War was the war of the great war poets. Was ‘the war to end all wars’ also the war to end all war poetry? The best part of Jon Stallworthy’s introduction to his Oxford...

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Subjects

Craig Raine, 6 October 1983

My subject-matter is subject-matter. Is it true, as it sometimes seems, that certain subjects are inevitably more interesting than others, however much we may protest that they are merely...

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Moving Pictures

Claude Rawson, 16 July 1981

Peter Porter’s imagination tends towards the epigram, but not quite in the popular sense which suggests brief, pithy encapsulations of wit or wisdom: Believe me, Flaccus, the epigram is...

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