LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

PETER PORTER (b. 1929) is an uncomfortable poet, whose irony pierces the text and fights his sensibility. Your Attention Please is a description of life after the last atomic war, a dystopia similar to Huxley’s Ape and Essence. The whole poem is a radio broadcast which instructs its listeners to follow instructions in very technical words, very knowledgeably, impossible to doubt. A nuclear rocket has been fired ‘by the enemy’ at all major cities. The professionalism of the language means to insinuate that there is no doubt this will happen, and when it happens,

Do not

Take well-loved pets (including birds)

Into your shelter – they will consume

Fresh air. Leave the old and bed­-

ridden, you can do nothing for them.

Remember to press the sealing

Switch when everyone is in

The shelter. Set the radiation

Aerial, turn on the geiger barometer.

Turn off your television now.

Turn off your radio immediately

The Services end. At the same time

Secure explosion plugs in the ears

Of each member of your family. Take

Down your plasma flasks. Give your children

The pills marked one and two    

In the C.D. green container, then put

Them to bed. Do not break

The inside airlock seals until

The radiation All Clear shows

(Watch for the cuckoo in your

perspex panel), or your District

Touring Doctor rings your bell.

If before this, your air becomes

Exhausted or if any of your family

Is critically injured, administer

The capsules marked 'Valley Forge'

(Red pocket in No. 1 Survival Kit)

For painless death. (Catholics

Will have been instructed by their priests

What to do in this eventuality.)

This announcement is ending. Our President

Has already given orders for

Massive retaliation – it will be

Decisive. Some of us may die.

Remember, statistically

It is not likely to be you.

The end of life on earth is in the line ‘Death is the least we have to fear.’ A superficial reading might say Porter uses irony to describe this world sick with violence and technology. Actually, it is more than irony. A huge bitterness, a coldness of heart, a remarkable courage to face the end.

A Consumer’s Report runs in the same vein. Peter Porter answers a ‘consumer’s report’ on the product called ‘life’. The language is as technically minded as before:

The name of the product I tested is Life,

I have completed the form you sent me

and understand that my answers are confidential.

As can easily be seen, double meanings bring irony into play this time:

I had it as a gift,

I didn't feel much while using it,

in fact I think I'd have liked to be more excited.

After questioning various attributes such as the high price, the fact that it does not keep, that it is very difficult to get rid of, that it is delivered even when you say you do not want it, there comes the question about life being a ‘best buy’, and this is how Peter Porter ends his poem:

But the question of a 'best buy'

I’d like to leave until I get

the competitive product you said you'd send.

Desperado in his cold irony and discouraging mood, Porter writes consummately and manages to get along without lyricism in poetry.