I am writing on hearing the sad news that Dorothy died this morning.

Dorothy was one of the 2007-08 Summer Read and Bedside Books Club authors and always a great pleasure to work with.

Here is her blog post from February 7th, 2008.

Plunging in- Dorothy Porter
This morning I began reading the relatively new translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid by Robert Fagles. I fluffed around for a while in the very interesting Introduction but then decided to just plunge into the narrative. And plunging in is exactly what happens when you read a narrative poem. If it’s a good one you should barely have time to catch your breath. Reading or hearing (apparently literate Romans read by reading aloud to themselves) a narrative poem is like white water rafting. Woosh! Off you go! This morning I quickly found myself clinging to the wreckage as Juno’s terrible wrath wrecked stormy vengeance on poor Aeneas (whom I’ve never really liked after he dumped Dido so piously).

Here’s a taste:

Flinging cries
as a screaming gust of the Northwind pounds against his sail,
raising waves sky-high. The oars shatter, prow twists round,
taking the breakers broadside on and over Aeneas’ decks
a mountain of water towers, massive, steep.
Some men hang on billowing crests, some as the sea
gapes, glimpse through the waves the bottom waiting,
a surge aswirl with sand.

I’ve seen over and over again the amateur video footage of the Boxing Day tsunami in an effort to imagine myself there. Something is always missing. The video footage makes me feel a spectator, even a disaster voyeur. With Virgil I’m there. And it’s personal. It creeps into my skin and soul as my experience, my disaster. Homer’s poetry works on me even more powerfully. It’s more raw and elemental than Virgil, and less filtered for an imperial audience. Blood smells black flies hot and bloody in Homer. And death is death. I love “The Iliad”, but it’s almost unbearable to read. Whenever I write a verse novel I have the greatest poets and most potent story tellers of human history breathing down my neck. They have set impossible standards. Writing verse novels is a profoundly conservative, even archaic, act. Doubtless an arrogant one. Possibly an exercise in futility. I am trying to reclaim fiction for poetry. I have thrown everything into El Dorado - crime, abducted murdered kids, middle-aged angst, old friendship, new love, sex, men, women, foul adolescent girls, the New Puritanism….If as a reader you can’t plunge in ….and woosh! …I’ve failed as a narrative poet.

Dorothy, you will be remembered alongside the great poets and storytellers that have gone before.