[In the following excerpt, Tillinghast reviews History: The Home Movie, summarizing the salient points of Raine's poetic technique.]

Craig Raine has been known in Britain as the chief exemplar of a late-1970's movement in poetry known as "the Martians," in whose work quotidian elements of life were seen as if through the eyes of a visitor from another planet. In A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, for example, "Rain is when the earth is television / It has the property of making colors darker." Now he has written a bold; ambitious chronicle of life in Europe, chiefly in England and Russia, from 1905 to 1984. His method in History: The Home Movie is to chronicle events—some evidently fictional—from the history of his family, the Raines, and his wife's family, the Pasternaks. The publisher calls it "a novel in verse." Though the two world wars, Stalin, Lenin, various English monarchs, Halle Selassie and literary figures like Yeats appear in passing, what we have is not "official" textbook history, but rather a demotic, home-movie take on this period.

The home-movie analogy is apt. We get flickering glimpses of family dramas; and, as with someone else's home movies, the viewer's attention is not always riveted to the screen. The English characters are fairly well defined, but for the Russians I found myself flipping back to the family trees provided in the front of the book as I tried—often unsuccessfully—to distinguish Zhonya and Fedya and Zhenya (not to mention Zhenya's child, also called Zhenya).

It is as if Mr. Raine were making the point that some of life's commonest activities are those that hardly ever get written about. What we see of life in the trenches in World War I, in a section called "1915: The Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars," is grandfather Henry Raine writing a letter to his wife and then masturbating. It is evidently a family tradition, because about 60 pages on we encounter Mr. Raine's Uncle Jimmy, who has a go "while he reads Film Fun, / his mind on Harold Lloyd, / Mack Swain and Fatty Arbuckle."

Mr. Raine has other obsessions: the deflation of bourgeois values, sexual transgression and violence, excretion. His anal preoccupations alone might be reason enough to call this book History: The A Posteriori View. If his poetry were architecture its style would be Brutalist. His Fierce determination to demythologize history is typified in "1924: Lenin Takes a Long Bath," where we are treated to a discussion of the embalming of the Soviet leader: "He'll soon be permanent. / Old ways work best. Evisceration / Those pharaohs knew about meat."

There are one or two tender moments in the book—when Henry Raine returns from the war, for example

     He spends the evening
     opening cupboards and drawers,
     finding the wary napkin rings,
 
     A set of six, like smokers' teeth.

Our response to Henry's safe return is compromised by our awareness that his wife, Queenie, has been violated six pages earlier by a pervert calling himself Mablethorpe: "She does it like domestic chores / making them both a cup of tea / before the shaving and the sodomy."

To be fair to Mr. Raine, however, he is a poet with at least one spectacular gift: the metaphoric or transforming faculty. The book is worth reading if only for the originality, and sometimes the brilliance, of its comparisons. In a catalogue he calls "a cubist quarry," cigarettes and hollow licorice sticks become "Wild Woodbines in packets often, / or loose in fives, sherbet fountains / fused like sticks of dynamite." The sound of water flows through a gravel pit "like a little girl / wearing her mother's shoes." Elsewhere "The boy lounges / between his mother's legs / like a cello."