Craig Raine has an extraterrestrial sensibility. His 1979 volume, "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," established a new school of poetry -- for those who experience this world as if it were Mars. Writing from the unfamiliar perspective of a space...
[more]Craig Raine has an extraterrestrial sensibility. His 1979 volume, "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," established a new school of poetry -- for those who experience this world as if it were Mars. Writing from the unfamiliar perspective of a space alien living in modern England, Raine forces his readers to reevaluate our world, to question the relationships between objects and emotions, and most importantly, to question the motivations for their own behavior. Fellow Martian-schooler James Fenton describes Raine's impact: "[He] taught us to become strangers in our familiar world, to release the faculty of perception and allow it to graze at liberty in the field of experience."
Raine doesn't just push character or voice to an extreme. His work slides forward through simile, dramatically tests the limits of metaphor, and marries the animate with the inanimate, the unusual with the usual. He conveys childlike observations in an adult vocabulary, thus creating mature yet tender awakenings. In the poem that started it all, "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," the narrator comments on his environment with startling originality. Mist is described as "when the sky is tired of flight/and rests its soft machine on ground." The transformation achieved by this metaphor is striking; a cloud of moisture is reborn as a mysterious machine. Raine invents new ways of seeing the world; his poetry, therefore, walks a fine line between the disarmingly new and the simply familiar.
Ultimately, he pulls off the perfect balance. The piece concludes with the Martian's comment on sleep and dreams: "At night when all the colors die,/they hide in pairs/and read about themselves -- /in colour, with their eyelids shut." The Martian's observations, like our dreams, are quiet, personal, and removed. Raine invites readers to observe the Martian observing us.
There is undoubtedly more to come from Raine, who has moved into new genres (the opera libretto, for one) and new territories of human behavior (love primary among them). John Carey, the eminent scholar of English literature, articulates Raines'contribution to date: "He has imposed upon himself the mammoth task of visual restoration, which forces us to see for the first time things we have been looking at all our lives. The poems in which he achieves this are as compact as bullets. There is not a word in them that is idle."
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