If Craig Raine didn't exist he'd have to be invented. After the Movement's ironical circumspection, and the agonised candour of confessional poets, his work represents a long-awaited return to exuberant imaginative playfulness. But fulfilling the prophecies of literary trend-spotters hasn't ensured him a universally warm welcome—like most original books his first collection, The Onion, Memory, sharply divided public opinion. In the year or so since its publication, however, there have been signs that several erstwhile opponents have become repentant advocates—sometimes so admiringly that Raine has been promoted from enfant terrible to Grand Young Man with unseemly haste. A Martian Sends a Postcard Home gives a chance to assess his claim to the new title, and because it follows hard on the heels of its predecessor, it does so at a point which would seem previous in almost any other poet's career. The advantage of this, obviously, is that it confirms the impression of abundance he has already given. The disadvantage is that it risks provoking the charge of repetitiveness or self-parody.

A few poems in the new book can be accused and found guilty. But feelings of déjà vu are usually infiltrated by pleasure at discovering Raine's energy and generosity undiminished. The innocent precision of his metaphors is astonishing—nowhere more so than in the title poem's description of a telephone:

           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.

This kind of perception is more than simply a means by which the ordinary becomes strange again. It's also Raine's method of realising and releasing emotion. Once, extraordinarily, he was accused of heartlessness; in fact, poem after poem registers a deep affection for what he sees. His way of looking is also a way of baring his heart.

Raine knows this only too well. But where he was prepared to keep quiet about it in The Onion, Memory, his recent poems suggest that he wants to tell us—as well as show us—how much he cares. The result is that we feel less inclined to believe him. 'Shallots' and 'Down on the Funny Farm' both threaten their own integrity by introducing chunks of self-analysis, and 'In the Mortuary' contains another, related cause for anxiety. As so often elsewhere, he seeks to record his compassion by examining a physical detail, but exploits the strategy to a point at which technique commands more attention than content…. (p. 947)

This tendency for Raine's poems to be knowingly tender, and thereby have too palpable a design on us, is a disquieting development. To some extent, no doubt, it's the product of containment within the peculiarities of his style: the longer he uses it, the more debilitatingly self-conscious he becomes. But he's aware, as well, of the need to overcome this danger—hence the significantly large number of narrative poems in the book. The stories and characters in 'Oberfeldwebel Beckstadt', for instance, or 'In the Kalahari Desert', are seized upon as the means of escaping his own tyrannical characteristics. The trouble is that try as he might, he can't keep himself at bay. Brilliant metaphors break up the sequential flow into a series of fragments, and masks slip to reveal the poet as we've always known him. Raine is not the first poet to cast a Martian eye on life, on death—it's his concentration on the procedure that makes him an innovator. (p. 948)