Peter Porter
Max Is Missing
Picador, $23pb, 76pp, 0 330 48698 5

DESPITE THE STILL common pigeon-holing as an urbane and cerebral latter-day Auden (albeit, like Auden, an Auden of the first rank), Peter Porter has always been many poets. So, of course was Auden, but in many ways Porter's voice is more diverse, a roller-coaster of styles from Popean satire and aphoristic urbanity to the nostalgia of poems such as 'Two Merits of Sunshine'. Almost off the emotional spectrum altogether are the core poems of his stunning 1978 collection, The Cost of Seriousness, written after the suicide of his first wife. The displaced despair of 'The Delegate', for one, makes for an emotional power that is still very difficult to read.

Like Auden, Porter has been productive. In 'On First Looking into Chapman's Hesiod', he described Chapman as a 'perpetual motion poetry machine'. He is in fact describing himself. (He is also a perpetual conversation machine, and one of the more non-repetitive around.)

An Audenesque 'permanently upright city where / Speech is Nature and plants conceive in pots' might be Porter's most comfortable home, but it is not necessarily his natural home.

Certainly his early poetry was, in part, an attempt to civilise himself — the boy from Brisbane who lost his mother at nine. I don't want to indulge too much in 'psychopomp' (a favourite term of Porter's), but the early death of a mother is a challenge to Nature, to Porter's particular human nature, beyond most imaginings. What Speech can cope with this?

'Being German,' he once had a persona write, 'I have a lot of soul.' Luckily for us, that soul, or nature, and its domains of grief, loneliness and homesickness, are never completely contained by civilised Speech. Time and again in Porter poems, it squeezes out between the lines like a partly deflated balloon pressed between fingers. It tickles our soft webbings exquisitely, often movingly. After his wife's death (more presumptive psychopomp on my part), I suspect that the phrase 'Speech is Nature' became an even more two-way equation.

So enough of the Auden pigeon-holing. Yes, Porter himself invites the comparison in poems such as 'Scrawled on Auden's Napkin', and, yes, there are still poems in this new collection that Auden would have been proud, or at least unsurprised, to write — 'Deo Gratias Anglia', 'Duetting with Dorothea' — but Porter hasn't been a successor to Auden since at least The Cost of Seriousness. It's not just the personal emotional range; he has also become more modern. A suspect and dangerous term — I use it here in the sense of an increasing density and allusiveness. Auden, in his later work, became much more chatty, even commonplace; the opposite has happened in Porter. His newer, denser mix of image and language-play hangs on threads of argument that are as much associative, even discontinuous, as discursive. There are exceptions. But even the more continuously reasoned pieces in this new collection — 'Calumny', 'The Philosopher's Garden', 'Tasso's Oak' — have a thought-per-word ratio far greater than most poets manage. For the basic building-block of a Porter poem is still what it has always been: aphoristic thought. His first collection, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten (1961), one of the best first books ever, also has one of the all-time best book titles, and is another aphorism in its own right. But the aphoristic style has also deepened in this new work; its gravy has thickened. The last poem is a hamburger of aphorisms (a Lichtenberger, in Porter's coinage, connecting hamburger-mince with the German philosopher and writer of aphorisms Georg Christoph Lichtenberg). The last crumb in the burger is a gem: 'You may list the dead in any order.' Seriousness still has its costs, clearly. The first poem in the collection, perhaps one of the most Audenesque, contains the phrase, 'Death / has only one true rhyme'.

Between these particular Lichtenberger buns, Porter squeezes a multitude of flavours, dark and light. More aphorisms, of course: 'the world must fall a God's length short of God', 'Nature votes Green', 'to lack the talent of one's convictions'. There is also plenty of satirical fun here:

A stanza by Mackellar
Goes by with standard whoosh
Its privilege and parkland
No rival of the bush.

'Duetting with Dorothea' is an excellent, witty, technically terrific poem, tinged like many of these late poems with melancholy. It also covers some of the same ground as the near-perfect 'Streetside Poppies', but in this latter poem Porter writes more of himself than of Dorothea Mackellar, and in a rich, dense style.

His own shorthand codes may at times be too dense, or at least too local. Australian readers coming across 'Julie Burchill' or 'the Terraces' will not connect as evocatively as an English reader. But if this didn't bother, say, T.S. Eliot, why should it bother Porter?

There are no dud poems here; Porter is never less than very good. But some poems seem more than that, belonging to the genre of Important Porter Poems: 'Magica Sympathia', 'Sir Oran Haut-Ton on Forest Conservation', the late-Yeatsian 'Streetside Poppies', and the stately 'Hermetically Sealed or What the Shutter Saw', in which he writes of a family photograph and, in particular, of his mother: 'She is to be my Mother and will stay / Younger than me forever, her hand enclosing mine.'

Les Murray also lost his mother at an early age. Consciously or unconsciously, Porter is evoking the opening lines 'I am older than my mother' from 'The Steel', a poem that Murray temporarily suppressed but is about to republish in slightly expanded form.

Much has been made of Porter's reading of John Ashbery, but perhaps Wallace Stevens is more of a later influence, acknowledged here in the suite 'The Man with the Blue Catarrh'. Darker and more pessimistic than Wallace's long exploration of artistic creativity, 'The Man with the Blue Guitar', it is another example of the dense style I like so much.

On the subject of blue catarrh, I can't avoid digressing into anecdote: my sole contribution to medical science came with a patient who brought along a small specimen jar of her blue sputum to show me. She was terrified — were her lungs turning to Norwegian cheese? I happened to notice that she was wearing an identical shade of mascara. The dye was running from the tear duct to the back of her nose, then joining the catarrh in her throat, and being coughed up again. Goldsworthy's Syndrome? I have a shy hope it will immortalise me.

Porter needs no eponymous medicopomps to ensure his immortality. 'Unlike our bodies which decay,' he writes in the first poem, 'Words, first and last, have come to stay.' His words have.

Where to now? Porter's is a fascinating literary trajectory, though perhaps more for the reader than for the poet himself, whose personal trajectory has included more than his fair share of pain. It would be terrific to see more autobiographical prose of the quality of his recent piece in ABR on Assia Hughes and her circle ('Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: A Bystander's Recollections', August 2001), but only if it doesn't bleed emotional resources from the poetry, which gets better and better.

Forget late Auden; late Porter is the thing.