Max is Missing, by Peter Porter, Picador,
2001. ISBN 0 330 48698 5, RRP no idea
Reviewed by Philip Harvey in Eureka Street, at the time of the book's publication
‘Chaos is the ideal of every pattern,’ it
is said, though the 41 patterns in this latest collection by Peter Porter
aspire dutifully to whatever order the poet desires. Purportedly ‘a late work’,
there is here nothing late about the delivery, nor any overstaying the welcome,
whether in the precision found in, say, his catalogue of misfit classics:
The Troiliad,
just as silly and twice as long,
with lists of heroes, ships and towns,
interfering gods on shortest fuses
and magic implements and animals,
its love-life platitudinous
and epithets attached like luggage labels.
Or in the brevity of a lyric like ‘The
Puppy of Heaven’:
Some sort of judgment comes to everyone -
Mind overtaken by its metaphor
May watch dismayed as in the evening sun
The Baskerville-shaped shadows cross the
floor.
(The publisher does not state if the book
is set in Baskerville. It looks like Times Roman.)
Even to be warned of ‘a late work’ makes us
pause. We expect a drift toward timor mortis, meditations on decay, or
reveries about being the oldest person at the party. But contradiction is one
of Porter’s favourite ploys: life is all we have to fear, creation is breaking
out all over, uncomfortably so, and the poet himself seems the liveliest if not
the youngest person still standing. Even the elegy that names this collection
plays delightedly with the mysterious disappearance of his cat Maximus: “Should
stars know Max is missing, would they guess / How little he must miss them
where he is?” The half-rhyme of ‘guess’ with ‘is’ names the territory we have
entered.
If there is an elegiac strain, it is a
mournfulness we have heard often in Porter, the still-not-knowing although we know
so much. He asks ‘is this love - / This inconclusiveness which orbits us, / A
spacious Swiftian teleology / Of backs being turned, and elsewheres to be at?”,
having just asserted ‘Love is the inward journey of the soul.’ He has some
fearsome things to say about fame in poems like ‘Tasso’s Oak’, still taking a
reality check as he ululates ‘Rejoice that of their number, one was
recognised.’ The philosophic urge is native to this poet, to the degree that he
can turn a proposition into an intense emotion or wreak Romantic havoc on a
cliche. Small wonder a favourite poet is Robert Browning.
Commenting on his career in ‘Streetside
Poppies’, is Porter bragging or lamenting?
After fifty years of writing poetry
I lust still for what is natural.
My vernacular was always bookish;
somehow I missed the right Americans,
I couldn’t meld the High and Low -
even my jokes aspired to footnotes
but I am open to Wordsworthian signs.
He knows more than he’s letting on. It is
plain from this poetry that Porter has spent a lifetime studying ‘naturalness’,
the language is confident, chiding, reflective, wry, inviting, even if most of
it is lost on a shepherd. One wonders who the ‘right Americans’ could be and
whether in fact he ever had any inclination to dally along their pathways. His
may borrow from the library, but the same Porter can observe critically, ‘Poor
Fellow, he’s vomited the Dictionary.’ Some would even say Porter has ‘melded’
cultural diversities quite skilfully over a lifetime of concentrated
literalness. It is precisely his transatlantic humour and manner that is so
attractive.
A more pressing question is, did he miss
the ‘right Australians’, whoever they are? Australianness vexes Porter. Its
brash experimentation and distinctive parlance have been studiously avoided. He
much prefers the comfort zones of English metre and tone. And in this
collection we find plenty more on the Porter complex of belonging, a major
strand throughout his oeuvre that brings to mind the door with the permanent
brass plate on ocean liners: PORTER. In the sonnet ‘Streamers’, he writes ‘To
get away, to make your fortune, to lose your virginity / you hold one end of a
coloured streamer,’ that snaps ‘the paper symmetry / of country, identity and
all your loved ephemera.’ The repair work continues in paper form, poems about
Sydney prickly pear, Brisbane picnics. And in the same poem, a tantalising
meaning to his Italian romance:
Then the creeks once known to you as spider
defences
on the school’s Cross Country Run, become
the babble
of a Tuscan stream, torrente to
Serchio’s senses.
An alternate land of summer’s lease, Italy
as a replacement Australia. You don’t have to travel as far and there are more
galleries.
Porter’s ventures into worlds of belief
continue and beliefs, frequently someone else’s, are his constant source of
copy. The desire to believe what he cannot in all honesty believe, gives Porter
a sure foundation, even a mighty fortress, on which to build his verbal towers.
And he will drive this activity to the max if he can. He may protest ‘I can
visit churches only for the Art,’ but then tell us more than most church
attenders about the Monophysites and Nestorians who would have it that ‘our
hearts, unreconciled, / Will hold our minds to ransom.’ He praises a musician
who believes ‘Up Calvary my harpsichord must climb.’ For every doctrine there
is a heresy. Claim and counterclaim can sound equally plausible, and often
plausibility is all Porter, or any of us, have to work with. Such atmospheres
are pumped into his poems until they are fit to burst. Restless, or is that
restive, energies are contained in these poems, form straining to hold things
in. An opening line like ‘The age demands that we invent the wheel’ presages a
massive move through time and space.
Relief from these heightened states comes
in his one-liners. Porter’s penchant for the perverb, or reconverted aphorism,
has been there ever since he uttered the hard saying ‘Once bitten, twice
bitten’. In this collection they pop up in what he amiably defines as Lichtenbergers:
‘E pur se muove, since all the instruments agree.’ One clever betrayal of the
Porter quandary, in a long line of betrayals is ‘The Unconscious finds
Consciousness irrelevant.’ Hardly the expression of a centred personality, but
then Porter is an expert rhetorician.
Physically and temperamentally, Peter
Porter’s poetry speaks from the city of curates and queens but, like clockwork,
psychologically he always winds up back in the city of popes and caesars.
Nevertheless, his uneasy acceptance of high politics and the cruelties of
existence only reminds us that, for Porter, the most important business of life
is really maintenance of a civil conversation, a common respect for mystery. In
one of the most conventional and indulgent poems here offered, ‘Magica
Sympathia’, he virtually reverences the life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (not
to forget his brother, George.) The last two verses say more than a little
about Porter’s ‘late’ reflections on his own life, here in the Wales of the
mind:
O Sympathetic Magic,
Shy fortresses and weirs!
O Forests Green and Stygic,
The wit of Passing Stairs!
Lord Herbert gave his castle
Up to Cromwell’s men,
He held himself a vassal
Only to song and pen.
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