[In the essay below, Lux gives a close reading of "In the Mortuary" and "The Trout Farm," marveling at Raine's poetic skill.]

I discovered Craig Raine's work (first his remarkable second book A Martian Sends a Postcard Home and then his first book The Onion, Memory) about eight years ago. I was immediately struck by its eloquence, which is never stuffy or merely decorative, by the sharpness of its tone, and by the odd Tightness of its metaphors/figurative language. The poems are intensely written, never wasting a syllable and using all of the tools available to a poet. They are serious, yet there is a vein of humor that runs through both books. There's a fierce poignancy, a fresh and lucid compassion in a poem such as "In the Mortuary":

     Like soft cheeses they bulge
     sideways on the marble slabs,
 
     helpless, waiting to be washed.
     Cotton wool clings in wisps
 
     to the orderly's tongs,
     its creaking purpose done …
 
     He calls the woman 'Missus,'
     an abacus of perspiration
 
     on his brow despite the cold.
     And she is the usual woman—
 
     two terra cotta nipples
     like patches from a cycle kit,
 
     puzzled knees, finely
     crumpled skin around the eyes,
 
     and her stomach like a watermark
     held up to the light.
 
     Distinguishing marks: none.
     Colour of eyes: closed.
 
     Somewhere, inside an envelope
     inside a drawer, her spectacles …
 
     Somewhere else, not here, someone
     knows her hair is parted wrongly
 
     and cares about the cobwebs
     in the corners of her body.

The opening of this poem, in its absurdity as well as its tactile exactness, sets the tone and announces the elements of technique for the whole: the softness of the cheese vs. the hardness/coldness of the marble, a sensory immersion into the scene, simple and specific, that carries an emotional reverberation. The b and l sounds of "bulge" and "marble" and "slab" are a kind of sonic, onomatopoeic equivalent to the imagery. The second couplet changes the effects to the softer w and s sounds which are more appropriate to the powerlessness of the corpse. This kind of subtle rhyming—assonance, consonance, and other music-making—goes on through all of Raine's poems, internally as well as at the end of lines. He has an excellent ear, a dying or often ignored poetic gift. In the third stanza he uses more aural imagery: the cotton "creaking." That's a sound that is also felt. "Tongs" and "done" off-rhyme and eye-rhyme. Needless to say, all this action—of sound, of imagery, of implicit emotion—in just three relatively short-lined couplets, is not accidental. The reader is now sensorially and humanly involved in this poem and with its (thus far) two characters—the dead woman (it switches to the feminine and the singular in the next line) and the orderly. The next particular detail is a good example of Raine's metaphorical intelligence: "an abacus of perspiration." It works not only literally, visually (beads of an abacus, beads of perspiration) but it also suggests her lack of humanity (she is just a number) plus it suggests the hard manual labor and perhaps even the nerves of an orderly: he sweats despite the cold, which is more sensory information, which places the reader further inside the world of the poem. The next several lines comment on simple, obvious body parts, all external, yet each one is presented in such a way as to make her, in her death, come alive: the particular color suggested by "terra cotta" and again the tactile and visual synesthesia of the tire patches, the "puzzled knees" suggesting a face, the "crumpled skin around the eyes" suggesting age and expression, and the odd transparency of the watermark suggesting lines, scars, stretchmarks, the things which individuate our bodies. This description, very fresh, very lucid, adds up to a depiction of the human (in both the individual and the larger sense of that word) that rings beautifully here. These seven lines, all one sentence, so lyrical, rhythmic, are followed by two short, terse sentences clearly meant to snap us back to the reality of the death, the ultimate coldness of the scene. This kind of syntactical variation is smart and perfectly timed. The first one about the distinguishing marks contradicts, deliberately, what has just been said. The second is serio-comic, bitter. The poem now, in its final three couplets, takes an abrupt turn and risks a great deal—sentimentality, primarily—but I feel it is a risk taken and won. I am moved by the ending because it is both a surprise and, somehow, inevitable, and because he dared to make this corpse even more human, in that she was loved.

Another poem in this collection (A Martian Sends a Postcard Home) that I like very much, also in tightly-written couplets (most of the poems in this book are in unrhymed or off-rhymed couplets) is "The Trout Farm":

     The trout are silent choristers,
     singing for our supper
 
     a cold-blooded requiem mass,
     though every one's throat is cut.
 
     Death is a young Elizabethan lad
     who shambles across the yard,
 
     his waders shrunk to buckets
     round each ankle. For him,
 
     the trout are stacked in rows
     like a crate of open-mouthed empties,
 
     waiting to be carted away.
     He doesn't see their soft Vandykes
 
     or the beautifully tarnished mail
     as glorious as a silver spoon
 
     that changes to sombre indigo
     at the touch of an ordinary egg …
 
     He kills them scientifically.
     At the touch of a switch,
 
     they become rigidly ridiculous,
     aristocrats with monocles,
 
     shocked as Bateman cartoons
     when some bounder mentions death.
 
     The boy turns to offer me
     a miniature organ of cigarettes …

The trout in their artificial pools sing not for their supper but for ours because they will be our supper. The puns in the first two couplets might not be as strong as some of his metaphors but still are very fresh. It would be very dangerous to be too serious here—after all, we raise, kill, and eat animals all the time. He wants us to see the scene not as bloody, chaotic, or noisy, say, as a slaughterhouse but somehow stranger: the fish passive, almost spiritual, and the executioner a "lad" who "shambles" in floppy, water-filled rubber boots. The lad in this poem is somewhat like the orderly in the previous poem—doltish rather than cruel, ordinary rather than a monster, i.e., more real. The next simile, comparing the fish to crates of empty bottles, is particularly apt and again displays Raine's odd Tightness of perception. The trout are just another commodity and not a very valuable one at that. The next five lines combine visual and tactile imagery plus a few carefully chosen abstractions: "glorious" and "sombre" and even an oxymoron, "beautifully tarnished." As is the case in so many of these poems, there is a lot going on, a rich verbal and sensory texture, in relatively few lines. The fish are killed, apparently, by electric shock (which makes sense: no damaged flesh) and "they become rigidly ridiculous / aristocrats with monocles" (which strikes me as a wonderfully accurate as well as comic depiction of a dead fish's eye) and shocked like a character in a Bateman cartoon. The Bateman reference I don't get exactly—I assume he's a well-known English cartoonist—but Raine's basic point is clear. He's being careful to avoid the sentimental here, but he is not afraid to risk, again, sentiment with the final couplet, the last line of which is an example of his metaphorical brilliance. We've all seen cigarettes offered that way but have we made the connection ourselves to the church organ? The organ, of course, brings the poem back to its beginning, the silent choristers singing, and there is also the suggestion of death in that offering.

These are only two short poems from one of Craig Raine's books. To me they make it clear he is a poet of rare wit, originality, and humanity. May his poems continue to arrive on our shores.