[The] boldness, which distinguishes Raine from other young British poets, comes from his audacious use of images to make his poems vivid and multifaceted. "Rain is when the earth is television." His descriptions are precise but unfussy. Excessive details can make some of his poems rather static; yet, "In the end, the detail reaches out." These details enable him not only to extend his metaphors, but also to concentrate them. Because he can capture an object with a few details, he can move from idea to idea very quickly and conjure incongruities. This startles us and makes us look more closely: suddenly we realize that incongruities have concealed similarities. (p. 156)

Raine's poems are not surreal, nor are they the result of automatic writing. The everyday (with a few exceptions) is not transported to a personal dream-world. Most of the time, his poems's accuracy of observation keeps them anchored to reality. Yet often they have a very peculiar atmosphere, which the reader first senses in the fusion of the natural and the mechanical…. There are fewer risks of sentimentality if you write about people in the guise of objects, and one might call Raine's method the "ironizing" of both emotions and objects. And he does effectively vault over our cynical defenses, so that by the end of "Down on the Funny Farm" we feel sorry for what we thoughtlessly break every day—an egg…. (pp. 156-57)

Not only do objects assume human feelings; they also undergo the death that comes to all of us, and which we attempt to deny and disguise, as we do the crematorium: "this poetic diction, / this building at the edge of town, / its elaborate architectural periphrasis / to avoid calling a spade / a spade…." Often the focus shifts uneasily between the general and the particular, as in "In the Mortuary." Here a female cadaver lies without name or distinguishing marks, yet the poem reveals her body in vivid focus and "Somewhere else, not here, someone / knows her hair is parted wrongly / and cares about these cobwebs / in the corners of her body."

Raine's poems also flicker between being "funny" meaning odd and being "funny" meaning amusing. Frequently they have a playful tone, with whimsical puns and juxtapositions that at first may appear as carefree as the toys dropped by a toddler. Yet the jaunty surface of these poems is often a kind of nervous laughter concealing disturbing implications. (p. 157)

Now that Raine has accomplished a great deal in his first two books, he must wrestle against his own natural strength, the metaphor, to prevent it from becoming a mannerism. Raine's achievement is to give us a fresh and even naive gaze at our world, to make us recognize that we are all our own Martian invaders, even on our home planet. (p. 158)