I was contemplating some interesting differences between two established British poets and two new ones, when I learned that I had stumbled into a School. We don't have those very often in poetry these days, but if my source, a newspaper mention, is correct, both Christopher Reid … and Craig Raine … belong to the "Martian School" of poets, who presumably try to look at the world as though they had just arrived from another planet, seeing it new and making it new by powerful and unusual metaphors.

It isn't wise to take journalistic mentions of literary schools too seriously, but I can testify that I was mildly intrigued, before I had any notion of a connection between these two poets, by their joint effort to introduce some new vitality into British poetry. I had been looking at new books by two established poets, Ted Hughes … and George MacBeth …, and shaking my head in dismay….

That's the context, anyway, in which I found myself intrigued by [Raine's volume A Martian Sends a Postcard Home and Reid's Arcadia]. Both books … are uneven, as though their authors were feeling their way into something new, but both have an air of freshness and discovery. These poets seem to locate the interest of poetry in its genius for metaphor and transformation, so that their work is less pretentious and more imaginative than that of Hughes and MacBeth. Raine, for example, holds himself to a strict program of going from one comparison to another, stepping-stone fashion. In Athens he finds "columns of corduroy, weatherworn / lions vague as Thurber dogs" and "pillars sleeping if off / or standing tipsily." These comparisons—to cloth, cartoons, drunks—are reductive and comical. "Mosquitoes," says Raine in the same poem, "drift with paraplegic legs." So they do, and what a strange kiss of particulars that turns out to be. Often the poems add up merely to clever fragments, and sometimes the comparisons ("a naughty wind has blown / the dress of each tulip / over its head") strike the reader as simply childlike, but in his best poems, as for instance "Flying to Belfast, 1977," Craig Raine brings his talent for metaphor to bear on his material in an evocative and reverberating way….

It hasn't happened yet, but if the exuberance of early Auden and Day Lewis and MacNeice were to creep back into British poetry, who wouldn't be grateful? These Martians may bear watching.