Peter Porter is a poet of unrest. Because this unrest is often moral and sometimes metaphysical, his writing has a prophetic quality rare in contemporary poetry. In the first decade of his career, Porter was a Hamlet raging at the world, seeing dishonesty in sex, emptiness in materialism. According to Alan Brownjohn, this Porter wrote "some of the most ruefully and brutally witty poems" of the 1960s. More than a social satirist, however, Porter is also what Douglas Dunn calls "a tragedian who can't stop laughing." The tragic aspect emerged most clearly during the second decade of Porter's career, when his primary concern was "the tactless misery of self." In the poems of this period passion gives way to resignation, satire to meditation. As before, the language is rich and forceful, but these poems exhibit a mature agility within conventional forms. His craftsmanship, his ironic tone, and his...