Craig Raine Summary

The effective impact of Craig Raine on contemporary British poetry may be dated roughly from summer 1977, when his poem "Flying to Belfast, 1977" took first prize in the Cheltenham Festival Poetry Com... Read more

Critical Essay by Derek Mahon 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 competit... Read more

Critical Essay by Dick Davis 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: '... Read more

Critical Essay by Derek Stanford Aristotle once said that the capacity to mint new metaphors was the readiest test of a new poet. If we accept this rule-of-thumb as valid, Craig Raine commences with ... Read more

Critical Essay by Lawrence Sail Craig Raine's first collection [The Onion, Memory] displays a formidable gift for metaphor and simile. Thus a barber 'flies electric shears fringed with ... Read more

Critical Essay by Peter Porter 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 ... Read more

Critical Essay by Michael Hulse With Cheltenham Festival and Poetry Society prizes and New Statesman Prudence Farmer Awards to his name, Craig Raine seems to have discovered the formula for the winni... Read more

In the following review, Ewart finds The Onion, Memory "intellectually so satisfying that some triviality of theme can be overlooked." [The Onion, Memory] is Craig Raine's firs... Read more

In the essay below, Lux gives a close reading of "In the Mortuary" and "The Trout Farm," marveling at Raine's poetic skill. I discovered Craig Raine's work... Read more

In the excerpt below, Kemp praises Raine's "exhilarating and engrossing" criticism in Haydn and the Valve Trumpet, concluding that "it is almost always stirringly alive to ... Read more

Below, Rumens disputes the publishers' claim that History: The Home Movie is a verse-novel. In "Epic", Patrick Kavanagh is consoled by Homer's ghost. So what if the Mona... Read more

In the review below, Kermode traces the narrative movement in History: The Home Movie, observing the poem's literary precedents. 'There is hardly a stanza in the long poem which is no... Read more

In the following excerpt, Tillinghast reviews History: The Home Movie, summarizing the salient points of Raine's poetic technique. Craig Raine has been known in Britain as the chief exemplar... Read more

In the following review, Clark emphasizes the narrative aspect of History: The Home Movie, while praising Raine's choice of verse as appropriate for "an age trained to think in images.&#... Read more

In the following review of Rich, Bromwich considers the autobiographical aspects of the poetry reminiscent of the confessional poets' technique, but reserves his highest praise for the prose se... Read more

In the following excerpt, Lucas senses Wallace Stevens' influence in Rich, but criticizes the rhythmic structure and sometimes the language used by Raine. Rich comes in three sections. The f... Read more

In the following essay, Forceville discusses the imagery of selected poems from A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, focusing particularly on the implications of Raine's metaphors and similes. C... Read more