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 own. But he keeps coming back from contemplation of some work of art—such as an angel at Blythburgh—to the fact of that death, as if by linking it in he could help heal the pain.

Often the message is 'they believed in God or an afterlife, but I don't and it's very hard'….

There is an irresistible pull in poems about death to come to some sort of resolution or acceptance, even if only a stoical one; but in Porter's poem the grief remains private and unbearable….

There is something tight-lipped about all this. Elsewhere, in The Cost of Seriousness, he says

            I have come no closer to my goal
            of doing without words, that
            pain may be notated some real way.

One suspects that he finds music a real way, although he says in 'The Lying Art' 'Music gets the better of it, since music is all lies'. It may seem unclear why he goes on writing at all; but in one of the best poems in the book, 'The Delegate', he has the answer:

         The artist … is being used despite himself. The truth
         is a story forcing me to tell it. It is not
         my story or my truth. My misery
         is on a colour chart—even my death
         is a chord among the garden sounds.

He sees his unhappiness in perspective as only a part of a polychromatic, amoral, but inherently beautiful world, and this is his form of reconciliation. (p. 25)