1961-81 (v. 1): Volume 1: 1961-1981 (Oxford Poets S.) - Softcover

"Elegist, satirist, art critic, historian of the imagination, poet of cats, and the cities of London and the mind, student of the times and of Time."--Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times (London) "Peter Porter's marvellous poetry continues to evolve like some great complex organic phenomenon."--Martin Duwell, The Australian "Elegist, satirist, art critic, historian of the imagination, poet of cats, and the cities of London and the mind, student of the times and of Time."--Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times (London) "Peter Porter's marvellous poetry continues to evolve like some great complex organic phenomenon."--Martin Duwell, The Australian "Elegist, satirist, art critic, historian of the imagination, poet of cats, and the cities of London and the mind, student of the times and of Time."--Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times (London) "Peter Porter's marvellous poetry continues to evolve like some great complex organic phenomenon."--Martin Duwell, The Australian "Elegist, satirist, art critic, historian of the imagination, poet of cats, and the cities of London and the mind, student of the times and of Time."--Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times (London) "Peter Porter's marvellous poetry continues to evolve like some great complex organic phenomenon."--Martin Duwell, The Australian

It is almost 40 years since the publication of Peter Porter's first book of poems, "Once Bitten, Twice Bitten". That collection has been joined by 14 others since 1961, all of which are gathered into this two-volume "Collected Poems". Porter's work has been remarkably consistent in its allying of a realistic evocation of life with rhetorical forms of language verging on the dramatic. He envisages the poet as a "thinker", a more passionate role than that of philosopher or moralist. The past, in Europe and the country of his birth, Australia, matters to him; the lyrical finds a place with the elegiac and satiric.