John Fuller, to whom I devoted the first article in this series, has a good title to be considered the father of that movement in poetry which has dominated the British scene since the end of the 70s: the Martian school. In The Mountain in the Sea (1975), Fuller's parlour-game approach to verse at times produced witty results that anticipate the riddle-making fecundity of the Martians, as in these lines from 'Thing from Inner Space':

     Lumbering, dreamy, pig-headed: like a smooth
     Cauliflower or ribbed egg it would offend
     If not armoured and decently hidden.

After a moment's pause we think: of course, the brain! The aha!-effect is typical of the reading experience we have come to associate with Craig Raine and Christopher Reid's work, as is also Fuller's reference in the same poem to "the daily theatre of objects": Raine's poem 'An Enquiry into Two Inches of Ivory' programmatically posits "Daily things. Objects / in the museum of ordinary art" as his subject matter, at the same time ostentatiously appropriating to himself something of Jane Austen's modesty (her letter of 16th December, 1816, is alluded to in Raine's title—Austen suspects she "produces little effect after much labour").

Daily things, but daily things seen anew, from a new and unexpected angle, fitted into new patterns, yoked into new relationships: this is the core of the Martian method. The inventiveness of Craig Raine's imagination is more than equal to Fuller's when he writes that the barber's "scissors scandal-monger round the ears," that fields are "ploughed neatly as a fingerprint," that foliage in autumn is "full of broken windows," that the snakes at the zoo "endlessly finish spaghetti," or that dogs "pee like hurdlers, / shit like weightlifters, and relax / by giving each other piggy-backs …" These playful images, by the zestful emphasis they place on the values of poetry as sheer fun, might alone identify Raine as an Oxford poet of the Fuller class, and indeed Raine taught there at various colleges after completing his first degree (a doctoral dissertation on Coleridge was abandoned) and in his poetry at times betrays a lightly-worn donnishness, as well as a love of Oxford localities.

Craig Raine was born in Co. Durham in 1944, but it was not until the second half of the 70s, after Fuller's The Mountain in the Sea, that his poetry began attracting attention. He twice took the Cheltenham Poetry Prize and his work was promoted by Martin Amis, then literary editor of the New Statesman, and in 1978 a first volume appeared, The Onion, Memory. Reactions to this collection—from which all my Raine quotations have come so far—polarized the poetry established in Britain, with the extremes of infatuated enthusiasm and near-hysterical dismissal equally well represented. Swift to capitalize on the sales value of controversy, Raine brought out a second book in 1979, and it is from this collection—something of a best-seller, as far as poetry is capable of such a thing—that the school takes its name: A Martian Sends a Postcard Home.

The title poem—to which Walker Percy's Martian in The Message in the Bottle may well have stood godfather, rather than any science fiction reminiscence—exemplifies both Raine's imaginative vigour and the flashiness to which he is often prone. His Martian has difficulty interpreting the signs on our planet:

     Model T is a room with the lock inside—
     a key is turned to free the world
 
     for movement, so quick there is a film
     to watch for anything missed.
 
     But time is tied to the wrist
     or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.
 
     In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
     that snores when you pick it up.
 
     If the ghost cries, they carry it
     to their lips and soothe it to sleep
 
     with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
     deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

The car with its ignition and rear-view mirror, the wrist-watch, the telephone: here again a riddle-maker's fancy is being brought to bear upon the everyday, and throughout his second volume Raine again exhibits an unsurpassed fertility in simile and metaphor. Thus "a glinting beetle on its back / struggled like an orchestra / with Beethoven." "Dolphins dam the sea." "Mosquitoes drift with paraplegic legs." In Athens he views "weatherworn / lions vague as Thurber dogs." And in a public toilet "each urinal calmly / sucks its peppermint"—an image the full Tightness of which, as has been pointed out, can only be appreciated by half the population …

A similar imaginative drive can be seen in the poetry of Christopher Reid (born 1949) and of a third member of the school, David Sweetman (born 1943). Reid's Arcadia was published in 1979—the year can be seen as the Martians' annus mirabilis—and is as abundantly sprinkled with simile and metaphor as Raine's work. His "smutty pigeon on a parapet / pecks for crumbs like a sewing-machine." His weightlifter "carries his pregnant belly / in the hammock of his leotard / like a melon wedged in a shopping-bag." "Your hair is Japanese / with heated rollers." Ginger-root is "arthritic" and chilies are "red leather winklepickers." So too with David Sweetman, who in 'Coasting' writes: "A lazy length of hawser can't spell / even one of the names of Allah correctly." Elsewhere he observes "the thatched huts lying as still as shells / clustered in an abandoned rockpool."

Clearly, then, these three poets share their most distinctive characteristic of image-making vitality, and it is this which has won them the widest readership enjoyed by any poets in Britain since the much-derided Liverpool poets pushed their pop products—this, and the fact that they (and Raine in particular) have been courted by the media. Ample newspaper features and a half-hour film on television's arts programme The South Bank Show have probably done more to make Craig Raine's name nationally familiar than his inclusion in John Haffenden's Viewpoints, a collection often interviews with established poets, or in The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (1982). Reid and Sweetman were also included in the Penguin anthology, edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion; the Penguin, indeed, was conceived largely in the belief that—primarily through the Martians—"a new confidence in the poetic imagination" had come into being, that "a body of work has been created which demands, for its appreciation, a reformation of poetic taste." I shall have more to say about the Penguin anthology presently.

But Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, and David Sweetman, though closely linked both by qualities of imagination and by the love the media bear them, prove on closer inspection to be writers with distinct tones of their own. David Sweetman's only collection to date, Looking into the Deep End (1981), reveals a more sombre, morally intense cast of mind than Raine's or Reid's. Historical and political factors determine Sweetman's conceptual range, whether he is looking back to Nazi Germany ('The Unhappy Inventor') or the Hiroshima bomb ('The Art of Pottery, 1945'), or writing of more contemporary evils, whether the suffering in South East Asia ('Love in Asia') or our fears of a nuclear holocaust ('0900hrs 23/10/4004 BC'). The economy, the anger, and the compassion of 'Stories to frighten children with,' which I quote in full, are all equally beyond the scope of Raine and Reid:

     Remember the Spartan boy, a snapping fox in his lap
     curled as if his own guts had spilled out, grown hairy?
     Today it shines in metal coils, sprouts wires, is hugged
 
     by a lad in black nourishing a foetal terror silently.
     But others speak, myths are made—in an Asian city,
     tarts wound themselves with lipstick, impatient
 
     for the crew shooting a recent war. Away on location,
     a make-up girl squints at a photograph
     before painting the acne of napalm on a child's face.

David Sweetman is uneven, but in such work he achieves poetry of a high order.

Christopher Reid too is uneven, and his writing is as complete a contrast to Sweetman's as we could wish. In his first book, Arcadia, the prevalent note was that inventive playfulness which—as in Fuller and Raine—is his most evidently Oxonian characteristic, as in 'Strange Vibes':

     That seven-octave smile, those ten
     chomping cigars, one with a golden band;
 
     nicotined eyes, and someone's squiggly hookah,
     fendered in levers, wheezing the blues;
 
     those three hypodermics pumping in a row;
     men groaning and swooning: well, it all went to show
 
     we'd stumbled by chance on an opium-den.
     Only the front man kept his cool,
 
     stiff as a waiter and stooping to lay
     such infinite knives and forks on a dazzling table.

No need to mention that a big band is being described: the reader's enjoyment of the riddle-making would be impaired by anything so specific. But Reid's poems, perhaps more than Raine's, have seemed open to the charge that merely to concentrate on attractive imagery is somehow to sell poetry short and trivialize it, and it was with relief that one found Arcadia also contained a poem like 'The Life of the Mind', a mock-metaphysical account of the passage of a thought or idea through the mind:

     Samuel heard the voice of God at night,
     but I used to see an Edwardian bicyclist,
     a roly-poly man with a walrus moustache.
 
     Since it was always summer, he wore
     a blazer with Neapolitan ice-cream stripes,
     a yellow boater, made of the crispiest wafer,
     and plimsolls, marshmallow-white.
 
     The rules of the game were easy:
     to set the man on his bicycle-seat,
     and let him balance there, without moving forward.
 
     He never remained for long, and every time
     his fall was as terrible as the fall of Eli.

This seemed to promise development along Empson/Wilbur lines, with a dab of Marvell, so Reid's second collection, Pea Soup (1982), came as a disappointment. Rather too happy to remain in a world of brand-new discoveries, in which daily things were insistently seen afresh, Reid continued to exclaim that "everything was bogus" or "the galaxy reads like a rebus," or that he found himself in a "playground of impromptu metaphors."

Craig Raine has been less prone to the potential pitfalls of self-parody. The manifesto-like statement in 'Shallots' in the second volume—"images provide / a kind of sustenance, / alms for every beggared sense"—has a wholer, more human tenor than Reid's pedantic maxim, in 'The Ambassador' (Pea Soup), that "through a studious / reading of chaos we may / arrive at a grammar of civilization." Raine's poetry has wrongly been accused of lacking either human warmth or a moral centre, but in fact it demonstrably has both: in Raine more than in Reid or Sweetman, the image is the instance of human experience, as in these lines from 'Flying to Belfast, 1977':

     I thought of wedding presents,
     white tea things
 
     grouped on a dresser,
     as we entered the cloud
 
     and were nowhere—
     a bride in a veil, laughing
 
     at the sense of event, only
     half afraid of an empty house
 
     with its curtains boiling
     from the bedroom window.

'In the Dark,' one of Raine's finest poems to date, is a narrative of a girl and her unwanted child: his images succinctly present the familial and religious pressures which are brought to bear on the girl and ultimately lead to tragedy:

     God danced on his cross
     at the foot of her bed
 
     like Nijinsky having a heart attack …

A pamphlet of six poems, A Free Translation (1981), showed Raine writing powerfully, with no slackening of his image-making fecundity but with a notable advance in his readiness to confront the recurring facts of human existence, particularly in 'A Walk in the Country,' from which these lines come:

     They are burning
     the stubble
     in the fields ahead,
 
     which is why
     the graveyard seems
     ringed with fire
 
     and somehow forbidden.
     Is it fear
     halting my child
 
     so that her thumb,
     withdrawn for a second,
     smokes in the air?

Of the three writers of the Martian group, Craig Raine has the most substance. I have shown elsewhere (Critical Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 4) that his method has affinities both to that of the Imagists and of the Rilke of the Neue Gedichte. Beyond both there is in Raine an affection for the French symbolists, as also for Joyce. His writing is intelligent, witty and rewarding, and his forthcoming collection (Rich, due at the end of 1984) will be essential reading for anyone concerned with current British poetry.

Raine's 'In the Dark' tells a story: the girl, after two suicide attempts, kills her child, and is found by the police with a shoe-box under her arm. John Fuller published The Illusionists, a long verse tale, in 1980, and a first novel, Flying to Nowhere, in 1983. James Fenton and David Sweetman often have a strongly implied narrative background in their work, and the Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon, whose strongest work of the 70s was in shorter vignettes of Irish life, included a long Chandleresque narrative poem, 'Immram,' in his 1980 collection Why Brownlee Left. D. M. Thomas, who first made his name as a poet, is now better known for fiction. Geoffrey Hill turned to narrative in his recent long poem 'The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy.' Among less established but clearly important writers, Jeffrey Wainwright, Andrew Motion and Michael Hofmann all have a strong narrative content in their poetry. The trend to story-telling in British poetry has in fact been visible for some years now and across a wide spectrum of talent, so that Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, in their introduction to The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, were able plausibly to identify narrative as an important component in what they termed the extension of the imaginative franchise.

Anthology introductions, by virtue of their need to sell the new, are often one-sidedly propagandist, and Morrison/Motion's Penguin introduction is no exception: both their choice of poems and poets and their view of developments in poetry have very properly been found deficient by critics of the anthology. However, it is interesting to consider their argument for seeing the narrative trend as more than a brief fashion. "Where other poets make the familiar strange again through linguistic and metaphoric play," they write, alluding to the Martians, "the young narrative poets perform a similar function by drawing attention to the problem of perception." They claim that the "fact of fictionalizing," and the "artifice and autonomy" of the text, are central to the strategies of the new narrative poetry, which they say exhibits "something of the spirit of post-modernism." And so on.

Though there is some truth to this, I can't help feeling we'd be disappointed indeed if it were the whole truth, since it would mean no more than that a worn-out perception of self-reflexive prose fiction had been imported into poetry. But I don't think this is the case. Rather, the new narrative can most persuasively be seen as sharing more with modernist (or even pre-modernist) than post-modernist practice, and as being more endearingly tainted with trust and confidence than anything we have seen since Eliot. Andrew Motion's own poetry, which has been widely praised, demonstrates this point. Motion (born 1952) published his first book, The Pleasure Steamers, in 1978, and took the Arvon/Observer poetry prize in 1981, but it was only with Independence (1981) and Secret Narratives (1983) that his work achieved a larger maturity of narrative power. The title of his most recent collection, like John Fuller's Lies and Secrets or John Hartley Williams' Hidden Identities, seems rather self-consciously intent on mystery, but in fact there is nothing secret about Motion's narratives at all, and their modernity is that of the first quarter of our century, as in these lines from 'One Life':

     Up country, her husband is working late
     on a high cool veranda. His radio plays
     World Service News, but he does not listen,
     and does not notice how moonlight fills
     the plain below, with its ridge of trees
     and shallow river twisting to Lagos
     a whole night's journey south. What holds
     him instead are these prizes that patience
     and stealthy love have caught: papilio
     dardanus—each with the blacks and whites
     of simple absolutes he cannot match.

It is their openness rather than any mystery that makes such lines so attractive; reading them is like being returned to an Edwardian world of confident sequence and understood tempo. The best poems in Secret Narratives—'Anne Frank Huis,' 'West 23rd,' 'On Dry Land'—could be read with scarcely any loss by the naivest of readers.

The world of Motion's narratives is a product of that nostalgia which has given the British The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Siege of Krishnapur and The Raj Quartet, or—in poetry—Thwaite's Victorian Voices, Raine's 'In the Kalahari Desert,' or Hill's 'The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy.' It is an ironized, fictionalized world which paradoxically reinforces its own safe knowledge of itself through the very reflex of doubt. The irony is a gesture the sophisticated writer makes to legitimize his own newfound trust in the Real World beyond himself; what results is often attractive, intelligent and even charming in ways that no longer depend on irony. Implicitly, the writing of narrative poets like Andrew Motion, as also the writing of Craig Raine or John Fuller, panders to that right-wing, nostalgia-oriented readership which in Margaret Thatcher's Britain is if anything still growing, and it panders to this readership even at moments of the greatest irony. This is perhaps the greatest shortcoming of what has been the most zestfully imaginative twin movement British poetry has seen in many years; but there are signs, in the work of John Ash, Michael Hofmann and other new writers, that this amiable if complacent guard is about to be changed.

POSTSCRIPT

Since this article was written, Craig Raine's Rich has been published, and indeed fulfills the promise of Raine's earlier work. Rich is divided into three sections: 'Rich', 'A Silver Plate', and 'Poor'. The middle of these is a twenty-page prose memoir mainly concerned with the poet's father, an ex-boxer turned faith healer and a colourful character who had had brain surgery, could peel an apple with the skin in one piece, and had other qualifications for winning a son's hero-worship. Raine senior appears in two of the poems here, in the third part: 'Plain Song' and 'A Hungry Fighter'. Critics who have accused Raine of writing with too impersonal a remove from human reality might do well to attend to the noticeable autobiographical content not only in this new book: earlier poems such as 'Listen with Mother' or 'Mother Dressmaking' drew upon the poet's family life and childhood too, with fondness and a nice judgement in recreating mood.

'Poor', that third section of the new book, looks back to Raine's earlier life and to fictionalized lives of others (in poems such as 'The Season in Scarborough 1923' or 'The Man Who Invented Pain'), but 'Rich' focusses more directly upon his present life, as city editor, married man and father. Raine recreates perspectives of the very young child in 'Inca' or 'In Modern Dress', or writes persuasive love poems ('Rich', 'A Free Translation', 'Words on the Page'); at the same time he permits himself Joycean word games in 'Gauguin', or adapts Rimbaud in the once controversial poem 'Arsehole' (see The Observer of 10th and 17th April, 1983). Raine has extended his range and his ability to unite a poem around one complex of related imagery; the earlier ingenuity which won him his wide readership is undiminished, as he writes of "the bidet / and its replica, / the avocado" or "eggshells / cracked on the kitchen table / like an umpire's snail / of cricketers' caps".