Bøker av Peter Porter

When Peter Porter died in 2010 his reputation as one of the greatest Australian poets had long been settled. Chorale at the Crossing gathers together the work Porter completed after the publication of his widely-praised final collection Better than God, and shows a remarkable and capacious mind - apparently furnished with half the contents of Western culture - still working at full tilt, despite the imminence of his own passing. Chorale at the Crossing contains love poems, comic excursions, and meditations on art, death, music and nature, all written with Porter's phenomenal technical facility and immense good humour. Chorale at the Crossing is the last word from one of our wisest and most compassionate poets - and is, quite simply, necessary reading.

Better Than God sees Porter working with a lyric engine tuned to perfection, and a mind that shows every sign of speeding up: Porter can make a song of what another writer might take an essay to cover. Whether working in the forms of epigram or narrative, or writing of memory, mortality, Renaissance intrigue or the surreal distortions of old age - Porter's faith in poetry as a road to the truth shines through. There are few other writers for whom contemporary events throw such long shadows or for whom the past is so present, and in Better Than God one has the sense of the poet attaining an increasingly commanding height. Porter remains one of the few poets we can open anywhere, and know that we will always be both enlightened and entertained.

Few poets now writing share Porter's sense of the big picture, his ability to read the small event against the waxings and wanings of culture and empire. Whether these poems look at Europe through the strata of its Golden Ages, revisit the Australia of his childhood or turn their surreal wit to the quieter domestic landscape, together they amount to a sustained meditation on the spirit that bears comparison with the late poems of Wallace Stevens. Magisterial in its perspective and possessed of a rare intellectual sanity, Max is Missing is Porter's most charged and direct work since The Cost of Seriousness.

The leading English language poet of the southern hemisphere and one of the most eminent and distinguished poets working in any language