News at Eleven: [Peter Porter] poetry knows that

(as "Nevertheless" has it) "its task is still to point incredulously/at death, a child who won't be silenced,/among the shattered images to hear/what the salt hay whispers to tide's change/dull in the dark, to climb to bed/with all the dross of time inside its head". Porter does not so much wear his deep learning lightly as fit it so snugly to his verse that it feels more like skin (the "salt hay" line comes from Ezra Pound). One day, perhaps, an Annotated Porter will show us the whole wardrobe.

In a lesser writer, the marriage of mortality and mutability with such long-jump erudition--Martial to Mozart to Meredith--would lead to indigestion.

from The Independent: The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems, By Peter Porter

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