Rich comes in three sections. The first contains poems about Craig Raine's immediate family and is called 'Rich'. Then there is a prose section, 'The Silver Plate', in which he writes about his boyhood and especially his extra-ordinary father, an unemployed and unemployable epileptic with a gift of tongues and overwhelming personality, someone who seems to be all appetite. The third section, 'Poor', contains poems which sometimes draw on the same material as the second section and which are about suffering of various kinds. What links the three sections is best expressed in Wallace Stevens's dictum that the greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world. Raine does not quote this, although he quotes from a great many other writers, but you feel that Stevens hovers over many of the pages of Rich.

I do not mean this to be a criticism. After all, Stevens's appetite for reality always had something slightly theoretical to it which is hardly the case with Raine. In fact, probably enough has already been said about the veracity and voraciousness of his visual appetency and it is certainly true that he is more willing than Stevens ever was to see the world again with an ignorant eye.

This kind of intensity of vision becomes its own morality, especially in the opening section and above all in 'Pornography' and the already-famous 'Arsehole'. Raine's taking and giving of the world—to borrow from a more recent poem—is the spendthrift prodigality of careless riches which at times degenerates into Mammon-like catalogues. More interesting, I think, are the poems which celebrate the catching of tigers in red weather, and which vindicate Raine's use of his father as a hero of the imagination. There is for example a poem called 'Again', in which Raine remarkably attempts to capture or suggest how a brain-damaged boy constructs a life out of the ways he hears and sees: 'If he utters the sound for pain, / the one with cardboard clothes // will punish his pillows / and let him listen to the heart // she wears outside on a safety pin, / the better to show her love // when she holds his hand.'

There is nothing soft or sentimental about this poem. Instead, it has about it the imaginative gaiety which is also there in 'The Season at Scarborough 1923', a poem which invents his mother's perception of her work as a hotel chamber-maid, and that also shows in 'The Man who Invented Pain', although this poem about a wartime soldier who loosens pigeons and who is sentenced to be shot, can hardly get beyond its opening. For this is the absolute poem, the purely gratuitous act of celebrating a releasing imagination as the pigeons 'poured / past his hands, // a ravel of light / like oxygen / escaping underwater'. Where can you go from there?

The direction is by way of fables about the imagination, with which the book closes. Of these the finest seems to me to be 'The Grey Boy' which, because it can't fully be understood by an effort of intellect, haunts me as few recent poems have. A group of children are camping beside the river … But to try to say what the poem is about is absurd. Yes, it's about different urgencies of the imagination and without the example of Stevens I do not think it could have been written. But it is also an entire and seamless creation.

Yet to say this brings me to the two criticisms I have of Rich. The first is that Raine's ear isn't always adequate to his imaginative energies. The short, three-line stanza form he has developed often moves with the kind of spasmodic jerkiness that comes near to spoiling such otherwise excellent poems as 'A Walk in the Country' and 'Widower'. And on other occasions poems seem to me to break up into detachable bits or simply not to have the accomplishment of rhythmic control they cry out for. This is especially true of the misbegotten 'An Attempt at Jealousy'.

Secondly, and less emphatically, while I can see the force of Raine's wanting to find fresh ways of speaking the dialect of the tribe, I am not sure that the programme will lead anywhere but to the kind of sport poem exemplified by 'The Sylko Bandit', in which he stakes his claim for a poetry of new, extravagant mintings: 'he is the unexpected thyng, / who values not those laws / long passed enforcing playnesse … Sick affrayd of sumptuary police, / we do fear his flambouyance …' But language is surely as much a matter of rhythm, of stress and inflection, as it is of vocabulary?