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 eloquence….

Not all of this collection broods upon death: there is a range of mood and of topic. Mr Porter's other chief subject has always been art (a word which crops up in these pages nearly as often as the word "hell"). (p. 88)

"Non Piangere, Liù" [is] one of the plainest and most piercingly immediate poems in the book. It begins:

            A card comes to tell you
            you should report
            to have your eyes tested.
 
            But your eyes melted in the fire.
            and the only tears, which soon dried,
            fell in the chapel.

and ends:

              The fire will come out of the sun
              and I shall look in the heart of it.

Writing like this he is totally convincing. (p. 89)