It's hard to decide where Craig Raine's originality lies. Every poet uses metaphor, and some do so more bizarrely than him. Yet, after only two books, it can be said, of him, as Wyndham Lewis wrote of Auden, that he 'is the new guy who's got into the landscape.' We are beginning to see things in a Martian way ('Martian' is James Fenton's adjective for the Rainian method).

This is a considerable achievement, since Raine bypasses avantgarde battles, while setting style too high among his priorities to be a documentary realist. 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home' is a better book than 'The Onion, Memory,' because it is a concentration of his talent, and an intensification of his mannerisms. He hasn't set out on new paths after his initial success, but decided to tune a shining engine to perfection. To his detractors, the Raine mechanics are by Fabergé, to his admirers, by the Supermarine company. This new collection may seem to depart from his former practice by including several poems telling stories—'In the Kalahari Desert,' 'In the Dark'—but there were plenty of submerged narratives in his first book.

Raine's Martian describes life on earth from plausible clues which misinterpret everything…. Throughout these poems, the purpose of metaphor is not the illumination of the unfamiliar by the better-known, but the sophisticated discovery of parallels which raise us above the everyday by their striking distortions of emphasis….

Those of us who retained strong doubts after Raine's first book appeared have been rebuked by his admirers for failing to appreciate how haunting his images of human feeling are. Certainly 'A Martian sends …' touches our nerves and remains in our memories more than most books of poems do. For me, the test remains whether this triumph of style can escape from its own brilliantly contrived limits.