Peter Porter
News from the Editor's Desk - January-February 2019
ABR News: Felicity Plunkett named the ABR Patrons' Fellow 2019; a new poem by Behrouz Boochani; the Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlist announced; the Melbourne Writers' Festival moves; Calibres galore; the 2019 Stella Prize shortlist announced; the Melbourne University Publishing furore; and more ...
... (read more)News from the Editor's Desk - August 2018
Wednesday, 25 July 2018Supporting the ABC; Jolley Prize; W.H. Auden; Morag Fraser's upcoming biography of Peter Porter; The Peter Porter Poetry Prize; ABR in Perth; Free copies of ABR in select bookstores; Dilan Gunawardana leaves ABR; Jack Callil is the new Assistant Editor ...
... (read more)Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Chorale at the Crossing' by Peter Porter
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- ...
Peter Craven reviews 'The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems' by Peter Porter
It’s the voice, isn’t it, of a master, so unmistakably in command of a music that is inseparable from the personal modesty that is its signature, which belies all grandeur and refuses to take credit for the gift but has it nonetheless in abundance. When Craig Sherborne read the last poem in this Selected Poems ...
... (read more)The sky is silent. All the planes must keep... (read more)
Clear of the fine volcanic ash that drifts
Eastward from Iceland like a bad idea.
In your apartment building without lifts,
Not well myself, I find it a bit steep
To climb so many stairs but know I must
If I would see you still alive, still here.
The word is out from those you love and trust –
Time is so short that from your clever pen
No line of verse might ever flow again.
In an essay on the poetry of George Crabbe, Peter Porter wrote, ‘It is a great pleasure to me, a man for the littoral any day, to read Crabbe’s description of the East Anglian coast.’ Happily, there is by now a substantial and various array of writings about Porter’s work, and I would like simply to add that his being, metaphorically, ‘a man for the littor ...
Poetry in English has lost one of its paragons, Australian literature one of its finest ambassadors, and Australian Book Review a beloved friend with the death in London of Peter Porter, aged eighty-one. He died on 23 April – Shakespeare’s birthday – by which time our May issue had already gone to print.
... (read more)'Littoral Truth' by Peter Steele and 'What I Have Written I Have Written' by Peter Porter
In an essay on the poetry of George Crabbe, Peter Porter wrote, ‘It is a great pleasure to me, a man for the littoral any day, to read Crabbe’s description of the East Anglian coast.’ Happily, there is by now a substantial and various array of writings about Porter’s work, and I would like simply to add that his being, metaphorically, ‘a man for the littoral’, with all its interfusions, is one of his distinguishing qualities, and something to rejoice in. Coastlands, and marshes, are essential to his intellect and to his imagination. He may never have had one foot in Eden, but he did rejoice in a plurality of territories.
... (read more)Biographies, exhaustively researched, can take years, even decades to write – Jill Roe’s recent life of Miles Franklin is a good example – but few have to wait a century for a publisher. Written in 1906 and sold as a handwritten manuscript to the Mitchell Library in 1926, Cyril (brother of Gerard Manley) Hopkins’s obscure ‘Biographical Notice of the Life & Work of Marcus Clarke’ is published for the first time this month as Cyril Hopkins’s Marcus Clarke (Australian Scholarly Publishing).
Drawing on Clarke’s early journalism, Hopkins’s memories of Clarke from their time as schoolboy intimates in England, and the pair’s decades-long correspondence after Clarke’s emigration to Australia in 1863, this volume provides an unprecedented glimpse of the author of For the Term of His Natural Life. It is laced with anecdotal riches, including Clarke’s habit of depositing his unfinished cigars in the mouth of a green metal lion as he entered the Melbourne Public Library. The lion, smoking the cigar, became a signal to his friends that Marcus was within.
... (read more)