Peter Porter (1929-2010) moved to Britain from Australia in 1951. He published 17 collections of poetry. His two-volume Collected Poems 1961-1999 (OUP, 1999) was followed by three late collections, Max Is Missing (2001), Afterburner (2004) and Better Than God (2009), and then by The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems (2010), all from Picador. Martin Bell’s Complete Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1988) was one of several books he edited. His many honours included the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, the Forward Poetry Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and the 1990 Gold Medal of the Australian Literary Society.
