In a touching interview published in The Guardian, Peter Porter admits that his interest in contemporary poetry has diminished: ‘I admire much of what’s being published now, but I don’t feel part of that world anymore; I’m left over’. This is itself an admirable statement, which expresses a genuine sense of loss without being glib. When we write positively or negatively about poetry, the sincerity of our judgement derives from the vital connection we have with the style of poetry we’re talking about. This isn’t, of course, just a matter of contemporaneity, of zeitgeisty references (Porter’s new collection comes kitted out with plenty of up-to-date ‘bling’, referencing iPods and internet broadband) but a question of tone. As a reader, and a reviewer, intensely interested in ‘what’s being published now’, I find Porter’s latest collection capacious, brilliant, sensitive, permeated by his usual deep understanding of form. This is a long book and a more ambitious one than most mainstream contemporary poets would dare to aim for. But I also feel that I am somehow missing out; that I am unable to fully cover the ground between the world I live in and that of the poems – that the vital contract between poet and reader has somehow failed to achieve lift-off.

That’s a mixed metaphor Porter is better than, and he protects himself wryly, in ‘By Whose Permission Do These Angels Serve?’, against lazy literary journalism’s frequent solution to this problem, that of suggesting that a poet is merely clever, but not ‘emotionally profound’:

…If X is humorous,
can he also be moving? If emotionally profound,
will Y still be inventive?

There is no real reason why a poet cannot be all these things – and what makes Porter a major poet, if that term has any longer any real meaning, must be his ability to write out of and for the entire human personality. His elegiac slant is always intelligent, never fatuous; his satire is still beautiful, and does more than merely ironize the movement towards transcendence. And of course, he is more than ‘humorous’, he is funny, sometimes laugh-out loud funny, as in the second stanza of ‘Chocolates and Gratitude’:

Sex demands its tribute as the one
Ever-interesting topic; having begun
With what the magazines dilate upon –
Mistresses performing what wives shun,
Or giving it, expect both chocolates
And gratitude – our argument insists
What academics know: the later poems of Yeats
Are the sublimation of ageing pessimists.

The real comedy, the quickfire snap of amused agreement, comes with the articulate energy that syntactically produces the poem’s title phrase in the middle of the stanza – the closing comment about Yeats isn’t as engaging, because, as the poet admits, this is what we already ‘know’.  The distinction between ‘academics’ and the poet, or the speaker, or the common reader, doesn’t appear of any genuine consequence, although Porter’s insistence on the argumentative function of poetry is valuable in a contemporary poetry landscape all too skeptical about syntax, about the motive power of the long, self-surprising sentence.

Perhaps I could suggest that what’s missing is precisely surprise; Porter’s knowing movement towards formal closure typically substitutes for a shock of real doubt a moment of disenchanted, yet competent recognition. The close of ‘Whereof We Cannot Speak’ doesn’t, for example, tell us anything really new about Wittgenstein, or the interaction of the emotions and the intellect, going instead for a rather neat gesture towards inexpressibility:

…metaphors with sharper beak
tear at the silence of unease:
a philosopher feels on his cheek
the tears whereof he cannot speak.

Those of us who have felt an emotional, and yes, a literary resonance in Wittgenstein’s writing, may take issue with this, although it’s not clear whether Porter is merely playing with a simplistic distinction between thought and feeling which he, or the speaker, does not truly endorse.  Either way, we know exactly where we are;  there’s none of that ‘surprise’ I was looking for. It’s important, however, to stress that this isn’t a comment strictly about form, and that, like the best formal poets, Porter can push a rhyme beyond its status as a satisfying stay, making it a beacon of rich and multivalent significance. ‘The Dead Have Plans’ ends with a quite brilliant triplet:

They fear the mirror they walk through is clouding,
There’s nothing either side, and only colluding
Will keep the living and the dead from colliding.

At moments like these, a blast of near-freakish insight breaks through the poet’s typically mannered tone, although I’m aware that to complain about manner in this way is merely to register the distinction between the poet’s and my own. It seems an important point to make, since much of Porter’s effect of urbane, consolidated wisdom develops out of the measured spoken tone of his writing, which works to build up an impressively provisional confidence without recourse to the crude ‘perhapses’ and ‘surelys’ Blake Morrison noted in the work of Movement poets.

What I like about that ending is the sense in which rhyme fits together and clinches the poem, while simultaneously leaving it open-ended, estranged from the certainty it seems to relish in itself.  Although he typically avoids the naked ‘we’ of the Movement, Porter’s willing to speak more subtly and cautiously on behalf of all of us, and make big statements at the end of his poems – these work best when they seem to be simultaneously undercut, outfitted with an undertow of doubt which does not totally wreck their assertive purpose.  ‘No Heaven Cold Enough’ interacts intelligently against Yeats’s ‘The Cold Heaven’:

But the ghost which Yeats would revel in will not be sent

Out naked on the roads for punishment – no element
may carry life’s prefigured comical audacity

Beyond its blood-veiled site: nothing waiting on this moment
or this pen will freeze the spirit to a mind-free shape.

In this unusually unrhymed poem, Porter takes a moment to borrow Yeats’s rhyme on sent and punishment and give it a new element; if there’s something wanting and a little too earnest about the container phrase ‘life’s prefigured comical audacity’, it is nonetheless true that the fusion of Yeats’s iambic pentameter with his own structural nous works the poem up to a striking conclusion. The poem works, as so many of Porter’s do, because it is not a ‘mind-free shape’; intelligence is alive in its every sinew, and it seems to be always thinking. Having thought rigorously alongside the speaker over the preceding lines, this reviewer can acknowledge the force of the sounding ending – I can’t be the only reader who’ll come away from this volume suspecting that if it isn’t, indeed, cheekily ‘Better Than God’, then at moments it certainly seems  better than me. Faced with such a high standard of writing sadly displaced from our own immediate creaturely tastes, we can only make ourselves read and re-read until we’re no longer missing out – hoping always that this is possible. Of course, for many readers, there will be no such problem, and Peter Porter’s latest collection will be an event of sheer unadulterated intellectual delight.

Peter Porter, Better Than God, Picador, 2009. £8.99. ISBN 978-0-330-46067-5

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.