In Peter Porter's The Cost of Seriousness, language is not a vast element with which the poet contends, but a game rhetoric forces him to play. In this book it is also a faith that has failed. If the subject of Porter's poems is the death of his wife, their recurring theme is disillusionment with 'the lying art'….

Porter has always been an erudite poet, and in this book (much his best) as in earlier ones, the safety net is expertly displayed—even when he attacks poetry as 'pointless'…. The poem ['An Exequy'] is a strange mixture of pastiche, doggerel and genuinely moving verse. It is as if Porter were unable to approach his grief without surrounding himself with intellectual paraphernalia. Yet he writes best when he writes humbly. (p. 62)

Anne Stevenson, in The Listener (© British Broadcasting Corp. 1978; reprinted by permission of Anne Stevenson), July 13, 1978.