Peter Porter's poems on the death of his wife, where the agonising minutiae—the appointment card from an optician, other mail after she's dead—are presented in all their nakedness [in The Cost of Seriousness]. He makes Gertrude Stein say:

         Nothing can be done in the face
         of ordinary unhappiness
         Above all, there is nothing to do in words
          I have written a dozen books
         to prove nothing can be done in words.

Porter does a lot in words but cannot do much about ordinary unhappiness, and this inability is a subject of many of the poems.

Despair and wit mingle uneasily. His cross—cultural jokes—as when Boccherini says:

              When I start an allegro
              it's planned like those washing programmes
              right through to spin-dry

are typical of his rueful sense of himself as a responsive tourist of civilisation, celebrating other people's art and the absurdities of his...