Porter is riotous, prolific. Fond of baroque, he is really a mannerist—that style which isn't a style but a near-chaos of old habits and new fashions fighting for life in an attempt at glory. He often refers to the period:

          Perhaps it did happen,
          the Renaissance, when even the maggots
          had humanist leanings.

It isn't that Porter sees the worm in every apple: for him having worms is all a part of being such fruit. In the same poem [in Living in a Calm Country] he calls it the "central unfairness." In others he takes this further: is it, he asks, essential to have an apple to be a respectable worm? Yes the two are inseparable: as unlikely the worm without edible home as the man without a world.

And a world is what he wants. Brilliant, sombre and always almost excessive, he wanders through gardens and...