Porter is riotous, prolific. Fond of baroque, he is really a mannerist—that style which isn't a style but a near-chaos of old habits and new fashions fighting for life in an attempt at glory. He often refers to the period:

          Perhaps it did happen,
          the Renaissance, when even the maggots
          had humanist leanings.

It isn't that Porter sees the worm in every apple: for him having worms is all a part of being such fruit. In the same poem [in Living in a Calm Country] he calls it the "central unfairness." In others he takes this further: is it, he asks, essential to have an apple to be a respectable worm? Yes the two are inseparable: as unlikely the worm without edible home as the man without a world.

And a world is what he wants. Brilliant, sombre and always almost excessive, he wanders through gardens and dreams countries, the past, death and books, making each his own for a moment and looking for somewhere to stop…. Porter's quick intelligence, delighting in contrast, plays over the surfaces where "pain clings": resolving not into sureness but firm statements of doubt. Grotesque and Roman by turns, his style can now mock itself—as in 'Baroque Quatrains.' This is important: Porter must transcend his new Elizabethanism if he is to sustain his work at the high level it sometimes reaches in this book.

The blurb says that this is a book about landscapes. It is—not only of place and body, but even more crucially of time and books. A middle-aged man in a dying culture, Porter's "true and disciplined despair" takes fire from precision about date and place. The two become one:

The heart of the storm is now.

as he puts it. And he ranges his various gods about him: literary—Eliot, Stevens, Auden and others are quoted and alluded to—and the other gods of antiquity. At first I was doubtful of them: like the creaking deities in the Augustan poetic machine they did their jobs, I thought, at the expense of all credibility. But re-reading brought illumination. In 'Good Vibes' the poet says that

          To have trod on ground in happiness
          Is to be shaken by the true immortals.

Here is a clue: another poet is coming to terms with his world—which is not bereft of gods; they simply demand a whole new language to capture them in and make their existence real to us. Without our perceptions, they do not live or care. They are ourselves. (p. 602)