[In the following review of A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, Bayley detects similarities between Raine's poetic technique and that of the Russian formalists.]

Who but Donne would have thought a good man like a telescope? asked Dr. Johnson, and who but Craig Raine would want to wipe away the sorrows of a new laid egg?—and in so doing sympathize even with the bowl into which it has been shoved.

    To want to wipe away
 
    From this one smudged face
    the mucus and the excrement,
 
    so many final straws
    and the dirt of all dried tears?
 
    Cold beyond comfort, it rocks
    in a kitchen bowl.
 
    And what about the kitchen bowl?
    Poor dogsbody,
 
    its hard enamel
    is chipped like a dalmation …

As the last word of the poem shows, spelling is not important in the world of conceits—Donne and his friends would not have been particular about that, however exquisite their sense of connection. In fact both Donne and Raine produce in their different ways popular and highly individualized versions of poetry's most ancient device for turning the unforgiving facts of existence to favour and to prettiness—the riddle.

Such poetry can always and effortlessly go back to childhood, making us purr or cringe with forgotten animisms (Donne on the way to an amorous appointment disciplines his whispering clothes—best silk suit no doubt—like children, and imagines his shoes as dumb even under the torture of being walked on). But in such ploys begin responsibilities. Donne's conceits are cerebral—good men do not actually remind us of telescopes—yet out of the boxes of such ingenuity a world of absolute resemblance and meaning is crouching to jump, for the language of poetry does not distinguish between the physical and the metaphysical, good conceits leaping like electricity across what F. W. Bateson called the "semantic gap" between the one and the other. Raine's stunned trout executed on their mechanized farm, become "rigidly ridiculous" "shocked as a Bateman cartoon / when some bounder mentions death".

If ingenuity comes off in such poetry it is automatically a part of the moral world in which all good art has its natural being. Shakespeare's Isabella imagines "the poor beetle that we tread upon" finding "a pang as great as when a giant dies", and the predicament of Raine's insect equally forces us to identify.

      a glinting beetle on its back
      struggled like an orchestra
      with Beethoven.

The real world is always saving Raine's talent from the concentration of comparison, rather as it appears over the shoulder of a child whose tongue protrudes as he draws it. His is the funniest version of what might be called the New Animism in English poetry. "The New Hospital" is a space ship "invented for nothing / but the longest journey / to a different world", but it is also alive in the ancient terms of legend and bodily function, which intermingle without hygienic pieties in the acceptance of terminal meaninglessness.

      Even the lavatories
      create a myth of peace—
      porcelain pelicans
      repeat to infinity,
 
      glittering mermaids sit
      side-saddle on basins
      and each urinal calmly
      sucks its peppermint

(An odd thought that the full beauty of that comparison can only be appreciated by one half of the poetry reading public.)

"Flying to Belfast 1977", the best poem in A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, creates a whole climate of feeling out of the simplest possible repetitions and connections. The sea is dark linen, the ships faults in it; the town, looked at from above, a transistor with its back taken off; the plane's windows like drops of solder and everything "wired up". A faceless, imagined bride at the end is laughing

      at the sense of event, only
      half afraid of an empty house
      with its curtains boiling
      from the bedroom window.

Haiku-like, the verb recalls mutely its equally unexpected fellow in the first stanza, where jet engines "whistled to the boil".

Raine has far too tight a grip of things to need to display feeling: it would be the most unfortunate thing if he felt he had to go on to do so, in the same way that every novelist today is required to be "compassionate" as well as clever. Some of the poems which do not come off, for example one about an ex-guard from a concentration camp, show that he may have qualms about this. One can only hope that he suppresses them firmly. The blurb observes with careful piety that "guileless comic vision" is "finally displaced by a sombre view of commonplace human tragedy", which in the context of the actual poems means absolutely nothing whatever. But readers appear to find it irresistible that the poet should deepen and develop a heart. Most poetic talent has an obstacle race before it, not a Pilgrim's progress, and this seems specially true of Raine.

Manipulation of comparisons and verbal echoes is of course a stock-in-trade, especially of poetic coteries, as much today as in Donne's and Shirley's time. But there is an exoticism in the way Craig Raine does it that is decidedly intriguing. His poems don't sound like those of any contemporary, even those who use the same tricks, and they frequently pull off the really difficult feat of not sounding like "poetry" at all, but just seeming a very clear way of saying something arresting.

The absence of the poetic goes with the absence of sentiment, and both with the odd fact that English does not seem the wholly necessary language for these poems: they could be literal translations from some other tongue, possibly the Martian in which the hero of the title poem sends his postcard home. "Mist is when the sky is tired of flight / and rests its soft machine on ground" or "the lighthouse stands / like a salt cellar by Magritte" could go equally strikingly into another language. But which? The clue is in the particular way these theses "make things strange", the recipe of the Russian formalists, and the closest parallel to Raine's kind of inspiration seems to me the youthful [Boris] Pasternak, who in My Sister, Life and other early collections verbalized perception with the same style of lens and focus. It depends on an individual domestication of "strangeness" rather than on any specific linguistic idiom, and poems of Raine's like "The Meterological Lighthouse at O" and "Mother Dressmaking" could go into another language without losing so very much of their special dimension of seeing and meaning. Pasternak's very early poems made it strange in a manner equally accessible internationally.

It is an interesting singularity that while it is virtually impossible to borrow or to imitate inside one's own tradition of poetry, and still appear original, it can be done by learning from a foreigner. The French poets—incredibly—learnt from Poe, Housman from Heine, Pound and Empson from translations of Chinese and Japanese, Charles Johnston, the admirable translator of Eugene Onegin, has also in his own poetry been a judicious student of Russian models. Raine's poems are very much his own, but part of the electricity of connection is this affinity, whether conscious or not with that related brand of acuteness and innocence of which the first couplet of "Karma" is a good example.

     Rubbish smokes at the end of the garden
     cracking its knuckles to pass the time.

All ingenuity in poetry is a hit-or-miss affair. When Raine's works, it puts us in new touch with life as unexpectedly and joyfully as the early Pasternak did, or the young Betjeman, but when it does not quite come off it seems like a closed circuit on a cassette, fixed up for the private pleasure of cronies. The Metaphysicals are just the same. Conceits can be worth the carriage, as Johnson observed, but only if they fetch us far enough into a new dimension of awareness. Raine's aperçus are frequently too pleased with themselves, as in "Facts of Life".

     Wasps with Donald McGill bathing suits
     were learning to swim in my cider glass …
     yards away, on the cellar steps,
     a thrush jiggled a snail in its pram

But at their best they draw attention not to themselves but to an unfamiliar pleasure of familiar consciousness.