Craig Raine Critical Essay | Critical Review by John Bayley

SOURCE: "Making It Strange," in Times Literary Supplement, January 4, 1980.

In the following review of A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, Bayley detects similarities between Raine's poetic technique and that of the Russian formalists.

Who but Donne would have thought a good man like a telescope? asked Dr. Johnson, and who but Craig Raine would want to wipe away the sorrows of a new laid egg?—and in so doing sympathize even with the bowl into which it has been shoved.

    To want to wipe away
 
    From this one smudged face
    the mucus and the excrement,
 
    so many final straws
    and the dirt of all dried tears?
 
    Cold beyond comfort, it rocks
    in a kitchen bowl.
 
    And what about the kitchen bowl?
    Poor dogsbody,
 
    its hard enamel
    is chipped like a dalmation …

As the last word of the poem shows, spelling is not important in the world of conceits—Donne and his friends would not have been particular about that,...
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