Peter Porter focuses on the consumerist society and the problems of life that a person goes through in his poem 'A Consumer's Report'. This is explored by the sustained metaphor of life and the monologue used which has an implied listener which is the reader. The tone drifts from a solemn one to a cynical one to highlight life's problems in that to portray how people see life as a bad thing. The main issue from the poem is that it is a life is satirical and people have become too indulged by product that it has become a consumerist capitalist state of society.

The first line of the poem, "The name of the product I tested is Life" expresses the poet's feelings that to him life is just a product and this adds to the title as it is a comparison of life to a product. Products, being tangible goods, have "different labels, sizes and colours". The poet comments on this because he feels that tPeter Porter focuses on the consumerist society and the problems of life that a person goes through in his poem 'A Consumer's Report'. This is explored by the sustained metaphor of life and the monologue used which has an implied listener which is the reader. The tone drifts from a solemn one to a cynical one to highlight life's problems in that to portray how people see life as a bad thing. The main issue from the poem is that it is a life is satirical and people have become too indulged by product that it has become a consumerist capitalist state of society.

The first line of the poem, "The name of the product I tested is Life" expresses the poet's feelings that to him life is just a product and this adds to the title as it is a comparison of life to a product. Products, being tangible goods, have "different labels, sizes and colours". The poet comments on this because he feels that there are
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here are This poem is an extended metaphor which compares life to products that are consumed. I read the poem to be a satire critisizing the the capitalist state of society. Life is a commodity which can be bought, sold and returned if necessary. Everyone with a life is considered a consumer, which is true of the capitalist society anyhow. The consumer in the last two lines says "I'd like to leave it until I get the competitive product you said you'd send". The closing lines of this poem show how people (consumers) in this society are never satisfied and are on a constant pursuit of something better than they already have. This poem, although written in 1929, has extreme relevance to the materialistic and superficial society in which we live today, North America.

Peter Porter worked in an advertising agency for some time, and he clearly uses some of this experience in “A Consumer’s Report”. The ‘product’ that he is testing in the poem is life itself, and he approaches it as if it were in fact simply something that can be bought and then used or discarded. He does, however, point out “it’s very difficult to get rid of”, and even “if you say you don’t / want it, then it’s delivered anyway”. The poem makes fun of much advertising and consumer-report writing, but beneath the fun there is a truly and disturbingly serious set of ideas.

The structure of the poem suggests a series of answers to questions put to the ‘respondent’ in a questionnaire. The first 16 lines sound like the entries in boxes on the form, but after that the tone becomes slightly more generalized as if the respondent is becoming disenchanted with having to give limited answers to specific questions (there is a parenthesis berating the company for demanding this). The responses then become briefer and follow quickly on each other, but although the language is still that of a consumer report, the focus is more obviously on aspects