A Kinder Start

Since a new book by Peter Porter is, though precious, also a complex phenomenon, one is stuck with the question of where to begin. The title poem, ‘Afterburner’, is perhaps as good a place as any. It is one of those poems (‘Clear Air Turbulence’ is another in this book) that speculates autobiographically and revisits youth looking for patterns and understandings:

I was being tipped backwards into the sawdust memories
of down-the-road, trying to set a sort of Scrapbook up –
my childhood, such a provincial world to be born into.

Still, I knew my real concern was ‘What is fuel
for understanding?’ Wordsworth had to be born somewhere
and so did Wittgenstein.

There are enough references here to give readers the clue that this is also a revisiting of an earlier poem, the marvellous ‘On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year’ from Porter’s 1970 collection, The Last of England. This poem, in turn, revisits Byron’s ‘This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’. There are, in other words, a lot of intertextual shenanigans going on, complicated by the fact that John Tranter (the dedicatee of ‘Afterburner’) produced a rewriting of ‘On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year’.