Peter Porter has always been, to put it mildly, interested in death: in his earlier collections he frequently reflected upon the deaths of others or contemplated his own, and even in his lighter poems death was always ready to sidle in among the lines of pointed social commentary and the mosaics of multi-cultural allusion. Now in this fine new collection [The Cost of Seriousness] death is at the centre. It is difficult to say it without sounding callous, but it needs somehow to be said: the death of his wife at the end of 1974 presented Mr Porter with a subject ideally suited to his gifts and temperament. The best of the poems about his loss have a poignant bleak simplicity, a sober concentration; without abandoning all his tricks of style he has refined out the baroque curlicues of his more playful works and achieved a flexible but direct...