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Informationen zum Autor Peter Porter arrived in Britain fifty years ago and has lived here ever since. Since 1974, he has visited his native Australia often and considers himself part of the present-day poetical worlds of both nations. Since 1968 he has been a freelance literary journalist and reviewer. He has published sixteen books of poems, plus four further volumes with the Australian painter, Arthur Boyd. He has been married twice and has, with his second wife, nine grandchildren. Vorwort Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Zusammenfassung Better Than God sees the eighty-year-old Porter working with a lyric engine tuned to perfection, and a mind that shows every sign of speeding up: Porter can make a song of what another writer might take an essay to cover. Whether working in the forms of epigram or narrative, or writing of memory, mortality, Renaissance intrigue or the surreal distortions of old age – Porter’s faith in poetry as a road to the truth shines through. There are few other writers for whom contemporary events throw such long shadows or for whom the past is so present, and in Better Than God one has the sense of the poet attaining an increasingly commanding height. Porter remains one of the few poets we can open anywhere, and know that we will always be both enlightened and entertained.
