Kingsley Amis, Dom Moraes, Peter Porter

Penguin Modern Poets, Series I #2

by Kingsley Amis, Dom Moraes, Peter Porter

Penguin Modern Poets 2

Genres: Poetry

127 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Best known novels of British writer Sir Kingsley William Amis include Lucky Jim (1954) and The Old Devils (1986).

This English poet, critic, and teacher composed more than twenty-three collections, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He fathered Martin Amis.

William Robert Amis, a clerk of a mustard manufacturer, fathered him. He began his education at the city of London school, and went up to college of Saint John, Oxford, in April 1941 to read English; he met Philip Larkin and formed the most important friendship of his life. After only a year, the Army called him for service in July 1942. After serving as a lieutenant in the royal corps of signals in the Second World War, Amis returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. He worked hard and got a first in English in 1947, and then decided to devote much of his time.

Pen names: [authorRobert Markham|553548] and William Bill Tanner

Reviews

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second of Penguin's Modern Poets series from the early 1960s showcases Kingsley Amis, Dom Moraes, and Peter Porter.

A fairly short while ago, I was reminded that I don't like Kingsley Amis's novels. And not, I've been reminded that I don't like his poetry either. The poetry is glib, lacking in feeling, and, to my mind, lazy.

Dom Moraes is a poet not really known to me outside this small collection, but his poetry seems to be the offspring of a mind glittering of images and emotions in a exotic rush. Good to see an Indian poet here, too.

Peter Porter is possibly the best known poet of the three today. At least, he's the one whose name I most clearly recognise... It helps that I like his poems a lot. They usually have a sting in them: The Historians Call Up Pain is about how history recedes from immediate concern and desperate controversy and pain turns over centuries into the "best bet Honours question" in the final history degree exams, which is perhaps tellingly juxtaposed with the terrible more recent history of Annotations of Auschwitz - I don't know if that was a deliberate arrangement for this collection, but it's certainly food for thought as present concerns become minimised in the mind as they recede into the past. Time may be the best healer, but that is at the cost of trivialising past suffering.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A selection of poems by Amis, Moraes, and Porter. This slim volume is part of a series intended to introduce readers to "contemporary" poets emerging or coming into prominence in the mid-twentieth century.

Kingsley Amis...

A nude steak posing behind gauze
Wins only gastropaths' applause.

An appetite that can be teased
Must be an appetite diseased.

This diagnosis may have point
When love's delivered with the joint.

- Fair Shares for All, pg. 22

Dom Moraes...

I sowed my wild oats
Before I was twenty.
Drunkards and turncoats
I knew in plenty.
Most friends betrayed me.
Each new affair
Further delayed me.
I didn't care.

I put no end to
The life that led me
The friends to lent to,
The bards who bled me.
Every bad penny
Finds it own robber.
My beds were many
And my cheques rubber.

Then, with the weather worse,
To the cold river,
I came reciting verse
With a hangover.
You shook a clammy hand.
How could I tell you
Then that wild oats died and
Brighter grain grew?

Now, once more wintertime,
We sit together.
In your bright forelock Time
Gives me fair weather.
Soon will a summer break
Well worth the having.
Then shall our hearts awake
Into our loving.

- Song, pg. 60-61

Peter Porter...

From Heals and Harrods come her lovely bridegrooms
(One cheque alone furnished two bedrooms),

From a pantechnicon in the dog-paraded street
Under the orange plane leaves, on workmen's feet

Crunching over autumn, the fruits of marriage brought
Craftsman-felt wood, Swedish dressers, a court

Stool tastefully imitated and the wide bed—
(The girl who married money kept her maiden head).

As things were ticked off the Harrods list, there grew
A middle-class maze to pick your way through—

The labour-saving kitchen to match the labour-saving thing
She'd fitted before marriage (O Love, with this ring

I thee wed)—lastly the stereophonic radiogram
And her Aunt's sly letter promising a pram.

Settled in now, the Italian honeymoon over,
As the relatives said, she was living in clover.

The discontented drinking of a few weeks stopped,
She woke up one morning to her husband's alarm clock,

Saw the shining faces of the wedding gifts from the bed,
Foresaw the cosy routine of the massive years ahead.

As she watched her husband knot his tie for the City,
She thought: I wanted to be a dancer once—it's a pity

I've done none of the things I thought I wanted to,
Found nothing more exacting than my own looks, got through

Half a dozen lovers whose faces I can't quite remember
(I can still start the Rose Adagio, one foot on the fender)

But at least I'm safe from everything but cancer—
The apotheosis of the young wife and mediocre dancer.

- Made in Heaven, pg. 93-94

[J Grimsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very nostalgic to me. Kingsley Amis was of the 50's drinking scene Dom Mores I found hard to understand and Peter Porter was of the early sixties and I enjoyed him most. This book was published in 1962 and this comes as no surprise.

[Philip Coulter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kingsley Amis - dated rather badly, I think. But some enjoyable moments for that.
Dom Moraes - not as straightforward to follow as the other two, but also not as memorable.
Peter Porter - some very enjoyable poems for me, others less so. Definitely the pick of the three.

[eleanor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Piano Sonata No.14, Op.27 No.2

[Lauren Freeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

liked some

[Radhika · Rating 3 out of 5]

so pretty.