Better Than God sees 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.

Peter Porter was born in Australia and, though he emigrated to Britain in 1951, he visited his native country often and considered himself part of the poetical worlds of both nations. He published sixteen books of poems, plus four further volumes with the Australian painter, Arthur Boyd. Peter Porter died in 2010 at the age of 81.