Peter Porter
AFTERBURNER
Picador, $28pb, 77pp, 0 330 434365

SINCE A NEW book by Peter Porter is, though precious, also a complex phenomenon, one is stuck with the question of where to begin. The title poem, ‘Afterburner’, is perhaps as good a place as any. It is one of those poems (‘Clear Air Turbulence’ is another in this book) that speculates autobiographically and revisits youth looking for patterns and understandings:

I was being tipped backwards into the sawdust memories
of down-the-road, trying to set a sort of Scrapbook up —
my childhood, such a provincial world to be born into.

Still, I knew my real concern was ‘What is fuel
for understanding?’ Wordsworth had to be born somewhere
and so did Wittgenstein.

There are enough references here to give readers the clue that this is also a revisiting of an earlier poem, the marvellous ‘On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year’ from Porter’s 1970 collection, The Last of England. This poem, in turn, revisits Byron’s ‘This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’. There are, in other words, a lot of intertextual shenanigans going on, complicated by the fact that John Tranter (the dedicatee of ‘Afterburner’) produced a rewriting of ‘On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year’.

Porter’s 1970 poem was a memorable meditation on the lives of poets, beginning:

Although art is autonomous
somebody has to live in the poet’s body
and get the stuff out through his head,
someone has to suffer

especially the boring sociology of it
and the boring history, the class war …

and concluding with a glance forward towards the declining forty years to come, a glance inevitable in the bleak Porter world. The metaphor, though, is unforgettable:

so I am piling on fuel for the dark,
jamming the pilgrims on tubular chairs
while the N.H.S. doctor checks my canals,
my ports and my purlieus

praying that the machine may work a while
longer …

So this was the glow at the tail end of my life,
this was the exaggeration I’d served so long,
the boosters were behind and what burned now
was all the fuel for living left — ahead
the prelinguistic purlieus of the gods.

It is characteristically bleak while joyous. Late middle age has produced not a slowly decaying rusty freighter but a fiery and supersonic modern aircraft. The trouble is that the fuel that drives the plane is being used up more quickly and the thing is accelerating towards its inevitable destination.

‘Afterburner’ strikes an intertextual note, and it is a central one in Porter’s poetry. It is not a matter of name-dropping. It derives from the fact that good poets are generally well-read, and Porter must be the most dauntingly well-read of them all. The self that produces the poems is not only full of hived experience but also full of texts.

So if referentiality is a given of the poems of this book, what are its themes? Just those one expects in Porter’s work. Music, poetry, ambient social and political structures and, of course, the self and its inevitable drift towards extinction. And the modes are familiar also: meditation in the high style, arcane jocularity and occasional moments of profound pathos, especially affecting because they appear in a context of blunt and honest facing of the facts of mortality.

In Afterburner, there is a magnificent poem called ‘Deuterothanatos’, the last of a group of three poems that relate to the poet’s first wife, who appears in the first, ‘Why Did Dante Pick on Suicides?’, as one of those ‘loved, unhappy shades whom Dante turned / To sticks and marl’. Porter takes issue with Canto 13 of the Inferno, arguing that life belongs to the living person, not God, and that ‘peace may be strangely earned’. ‘Deuterothanatos’ itself begins with the discovery of a poem by the wife, written as a child. The poem goes on to meditate on the way that something of our deaths may be shown to us in our lives and then to worry whether the calm, prepared and confident embracing of death might not, at the last moment, be overwhelmed by terror. It finishes with Porter thinking about his own death, being conducted into the underworld in full pagan style with Hermes as psychopomp:

I see myself revealed
in solemn Greek proceeding hand-in-hand
with airborne Hermes, second-
guessing what’s to come — with you ahead,
the light already low, and perhaps goldening.

Like the much earlier ‘Non Piangere, Liù’, it is a very moving poem, and all the more so because of its context. Some of this context is both brilliant and funny. ‘Seminar Scratchcards’ is a collection of clever sayings listed as though they could be dipped into for material in a debate; ‘Ideological Moments’ is a series of political squibs (‘To wither away the state must grow a tumour. / This lesson is from Capitalism’); and ‘Scordatura’ (subtitled ‘A Few Musical Re-Tunings’) is a set of three-line poems about music and musicians. The first touches on a paradox most of us have pondered at some time or other: ‘Looking through the catalogue of works by Liszt / provokes the thought, he can’t have spent / the whole of his life fucking’; and a later one returns to the inevitable theme of extinction: ‘Having looked into the abyss, true originals / make their Swan Songs ordinary and cheerful — / not Der Doppelgänger, but Die Taubenpost.’

Finally, there are those poems that consider the significance of being a poet, an occupation full of anomalies in the present age. One, ‘Mi Diverto’, asks why, ‘if the world be mad / And tied up to success / With hope of trading good for bad’, anybody should ‘contrive an art / Touching not the least / A juster, fairer, kinder start’. Another, ‘With Blinds Pulled Down’, joins Mozart on the journey to Prague, keeping the carriage sealed off so that the outside world will not distract him from a life of continuous creativity. ‘And on the Beach Undid His Corded Bales’ reconsiders Porter’s earlier approval of John Ashbery before going on to consider the Victorians as a generation that made an art out of the knowledge of the collapse of the absolutes.

The best of this sort of poem is perhaps ‘Horace’s Odes Translated’. By considering versions of Horace by contemporary American poets and translators, it paves the way for a series of comparisons between the two empires:

The fine scribes of America are herded here together,
The subsidized Aediles, the Ivy League Grammarians,
compilers of historically flattering parallels,
beneficiaries of a Military Industrial Estate —

all are between the covers of a well-printed book
to honour the lightly louche Italic poet who
loved both boys and girls and knew best how to please
the hard men of his time …

but describes Horace as ‘always and ever the querulous protestor at / fate and extinction, whether wandering after Philippi / or narrowly missed by an old and rotten tree’. Such a description inevitably suggests some identification with Rome’s greatest poet on Porter’s part, and when the poem concludes by asking

Eheu fugaces — we learn to sigh and greet a Postumus
in every generation with comradely decorum —
America may pass away, and Europe, but will singers
of tomorrow’s carmina reflect their world so well?

we are back to the question of what poetry does. Arnold and Clough may reflect their world with its rapidly absconding God more resonantly than Ashbery reflects a world reduced to nothing more than styles. Where Porter, another great poet of his age, fits into this scheme is a question for later generations of readers.