Do our modern poets ever read Richard Hooker? There is a sentence deep in Ecclesiastical Polity that describes a great deal of new poetry with alarming precision: 'The mixture of those things by speech which by Nature are divided is the mother of all error.' Craig Raine has made his reputation as the arch-priest of such 'error' and his new chapbook [A Free Translation] has its fair share of giraffes as Anglepoise lamps and jelly-fish as Dali watches (Dali, the artist as rearranger of the familiar par excellence, comes twice in the book). But Mr. Raine seems already to be growing tired of such games—his first poem moves towards its emotional climax with the question 'What is real?' and in the most interesting of the six offered he compares himself to a housemaid 'suddenly homesick / for the real …'. In the same way the last poem shows up the sad truths behind the tricks and pretences of a circus: these poems mark a welcome advance on his former work—he seems ready to replace its cute visual punning with a more interesting need to confront the realities that persist beneath the merely spectacular. (p. 22)