Peter Porter might be described, unkindly, as another, younger, quirkier, brighter Betjeman. Certainly his verse is marred by the same jocose, inapposite cleverness…. He is not always … offensive [in Preaching to the Converted], he is often merely glib, and fancy: "I've never been on Ulysses' island / or on Isherwood's"; "God is a Super-Director / who's terribly good at crowd scenes, / but He has only one tense, the present." I take it there is a strategy here, rather than simple recklessness: hard, brittle jokes are an oblique (very oblique) mark of your sensibility. Of course, an open, sentimental concern for the issues of our time can look very fraudulent, and Porter nattily defends the old Poetry against the earnestness of the young…. But if you're defending the small, civilized life against the hordes of youth and socialism, if your line is the quiet human notations which make poetry precious under...