Only occasionally does a poet appear whose voice is instantly and uniquely recognisable, and Raine is such a poet. Pseudonymous and badly type-written, as for a competition, a poem by him would not long retain its pseudonymity. His peculiar and startling metaphors would give him away at once. Also his predilection for the present indicative tense. Thus:

      Surrounded by sausages, the butcher stands
      smoking a pencil like Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Most things in [The Onion, Memory] happen like this, and while they can become tiresome, wearying you with their gratuitous cleverness, one must acknowledge the figurative sureness of touch, the surprise and pleasure Raine provides, not only at his best but almost as a matter of course.

Contemporary English poetry is full of people—living, loving, dying and being remembered. This is appropriate in a humanistic culture. Raine's poetry, too, is densely populated, but the object has a life of its own—not as a rule the anthropomorphic life attributed to it by certain French and American poets, although at one point he does say precisely this:

          Esse is percipi. Berkeley knew
          the gentle irony of objects, how
          they told amusing lies and drew laughter,
          if only we believed our eyes.

But something (a fear of pretension, a distrust of the numinous?) keeps him chary of an intellectual commitment to this line of thought, with the result that what might have been (might yet be, perhaps) metaphysical in the strict sense, remains merely playful. Some, including the poet himself no doubt, will take issue with that 'merely', but I offer the observation for what it's worth. This is, of course, a first volume; and who, contemplating, say, the early work of Wallace Stevens, could have foreseen 'The Idea of Order at Key West'? Playful or not, an attentive interest in the things of this world is no bad way for a poet to begin. Perhaps it's the best way, even the only way. An accusation of mereness would be premature. But I'm reviewing The Onion, Memory, not his future work, so let me return to it, with its Nabokovian title.

Nabokov, in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, speaks of 'that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying pan'. Raine appears to have little interest in 'beauty', 'art' or halos, but his imagination is fired by the sight of a cheesewire ('a sun-dial selling by the hour'), a wall-phone ('the flex / is Jewish Orthodox'—I presume he means Hassidic), the 'Regency stripes' of a college lawn, a horse's mouth 'like a boxing glove', 'cabbage whites with caviar eyes', a spectacle case 'like a mussel'. These are the things for which this collection will be deservedly praised.

As for its human population, I'm not so sure. A poet like Douglas Dunn, who has already submitted objects to the Rainean treatment, and as arrestingly (television aerials like Chinese calligraphy, 'the music inside fruit'), has also written so well and with such insight about other people that nothing less will suffice. I fear that Raine, preoccupied with the quiddity of objects and the figurative trouvaille, doesn't really give a damn about the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker: he prefers the company of the chop, the loaf and the candlestick. This wouldn't matter if he didn't sometimes seem a little heartless.

Thus, consider 'Home for the Elderly', where youth appears to mock at age, or 'Danse Macabre', where a man who has collapsed on the pavement is whimsically compared to a Blue Period Picasso. 'All day he wrings his hands, crying buckets', says Raine of a window cleaner; but this tells us nothing about the window cleaner, only about language. James Joyce, whom he clearly admires (two of the poems bear Joycean epigraphs), told us about both….

Conventionally enough, the one moving poem in the book, and the most achieved, is the title poem, in which the poet revisits his ex-wife:

              Divorced, but friends again at last,
              we walk old ground together

They pass an amicable and inconsequential day while, outside, 'the trees are bending over backwards / to please the wind'. He slices onions; she does some sewing: 'It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry.' Here, at last, is the human face; and, as if to acknowledge the depth of his engagement, the object itself rises to the occasion.