A word would give a party and leave the guests to clean the mess up. The next line defeats that expectation, tossing in another of Porter's sensible, concrete images, creating another of his Surrealist concatenations. Porter's narratives steer away from conventional anticipations, emphasising by doing so the straining of language to reach further, to refresh the familiar. A faith, of sorts, in language, music and art underpins the collection, and I suspect the allusiveness demands effort by readers in Europe as well as Australia. References to Verdi's villa, the lion of Antonello da Messina, Bellini, Heine and John Ford make us work at employing our intelligence, testing our own sense of meaning.
Playfulness characterises many of the references.
Michael Sharkey is a poet who regularly reviews for Abr .