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Chorale at the Crossing by by Peter Porter

by
May 2016, no. 381

Chorale at the Crossing by by Peter Porter

Picador, $24.99 pb, 67 pp, 9781509801695

Chorale at the Crossing by by Peter Porter

by
May 2016, no. 381

Peter Porter's posthumous collection of poems, Chorale at the Crossing, is preoccupied, understandably, with death – but death was a central preoccupation of his work from the beginning. How could it not be? He lost his mother at the age of nine.

Porter's two Collected Poems (1983 and 1999) were – are – stupendous, exuberant treasure-houses of riches, but death is the dark stitching. Death and sex – two stitchings. No three: death, sex, and cats. Four: death, sex, cats, and European High Art. And since this list is beginning to sound like Eric Idle in the Spanish Inquisition, I might round it out: death, sex, cats, and Pythonesqe humour. Porter was a very funny writer – as an irreverent satirist and aphorist, certainly, but also as an absurdist. There are jokes curled through even his most cryptic poems.

Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Chorale at the Crossing' by Peter Porter

Chorale at the Crossing

by by Peter Porter

Picador, $24.99 pb, 67 pp, 9781509801695

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