Peter Porter in conversation with Fiona Sampson

‘The product I tested is Life’

In 1951, Peter Porter arrived in this country on a boat from Australia, young, unpublished, and hopeful. He found himself at home in what he has described as ‘a London which was in me from the start’, and ten years later published his first collection, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, establishing himself as a witty moralist of the louche world of the late Fifties. Since then, he has come to be honoured as one of our most mordantly observant and wide-ranging poets, able to turn his hand as effectively to satire as to reverie. Author of seventeen collections – the most recent of which, Afterburner, celebrates ‘the glow at the tail-end of my life’ – he takes stock of his life and work in the company of Fiona Sampson, poet and editor of Poetry Review.

Recorded Monday 12 November 2007.