Mars Peter Porter
Illustrated by Arthur Boyd
Andre Deutch

Mars, hoodlum son of Hera and Zeus, liked more than a malenky bit of ultra-violence, so the sources say, and Thracian deity that he was – the more gratuitous the better.

In Mars, Peter Porter, in his fourth collaborative volume with artist Arthur Boyd, has written his most pungent verses since Annotations of Auschwitz. Mars is a splenetic jeremiad against twentieth century warfare alongside which Boyd’s stumpy, perfunctorily daubed …

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Book Reviewers’ Choice

Best reading for 1988 would have to include Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (King Penguin). It was turned into a sublime film by Bill Forsythe, but the novel, first published in 1981, is even sublimer. Beautifully written, eerie and strangely consoling, it is a rare work.

Julia Voznesenkaya’s The Women’s Decameron (Methuen) is a cycle of stories told by ten women quarantined in a present-day maternity hospital in Leningrad. The hundred stories tell, among other things, of First Love, …

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