Search results for ""Author Peter Porter""

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.

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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.

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In this new selection from the poetry of Lawrence Durrell (the first for thirty years), Peter Porter has drawn on the full range of the published work, from A Private Country (1943) to Vega (1973), and has provided a long overdue revaluation of Durrell's poetic career. In his detailed and generous introduction, Porter makes the case for A Private Country as one of the most accomplished debut collections of the twentieth century, and traces Durrell's preoccupations and poetic personality within the wider scene. The selection of poems makes its own strong case for the continuing power and originality of this attractive, metropolitan and wholly individual body of work.

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Following the terrific success of Max is Missing -- winner of the Forward Prize for best poetry collection -- Peter Porter has produced another book of great power and erudition. 'Afterburner' -- the device that provides the extra thrust to a turbojet -- is a thoroughly appropriate title for this fuel-injected work. From his lengthening perspective and high vantage, no one is better placed than Porter to give these subtle meditations on art, life and the social mores - and few could manage them with such compassion and humour. Afterburner will further enhance his reputation as one of the finest poets writing in English today.

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The poems have been rendered into vigorous contemporary English. A selection of Michelangelo's letters, many of the to important contemporaries such as Vasari and Duke Cosimo, is accompanied by the `Life' of the great artist written by his pupil Ascanio Condivi. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Born in Hampshire in 1918, Martin Bell was the leading member of the 'lost generation' of English poets whose careers were interrupted by the War. He was a prominent member of The Group during the fifties, and a major influence on younger poets like Peter Redgrove and Peter Porter. His poetry reached a wide audience during the sixties through Penguin Modern Poets, and in 1967 he published his Collected Poems,1937-1966, his first and last book. Bell was also a champion and brilliant translator of French Surrealist poets. He died in poverty in Leeds in 1978. Like other 'provincial' working-class contemporaries, Bell wrote fantastical, highly erudite, biting, belligerent poetry. And yet – as Philip Hobsbaum said – he also wrote 'some of the most delicate love poems of our time' as well as 'one of the major war poems in the language'. A. Alvarez called him 'an emotional tightrope walker... He writes a rather bitter, tensely colloquial verse based, it seems, on a radical dislike for both himself and pretty much everything else.'

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