SOURCE: "Tricks and Treats," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4255, October 19, 1984, p. 1193.

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 section.

Craig Raine's early poems belonged to a subgenre that the Germans call "thing-poems". They dealt with such things as "Misericords", "Houses in North Oxford" and, making allowances for compound entities, "The Fair in St. Giles" and "Demolition with Tobacco Speck". Other poems, close to these in simplicity, made up a sequence on tradesmen, including "The Butcher", "The Barber" and "The Ice Cream Man". A second sequence took as its subjects Pre-Raphaelite paintings with self-explanatory titles: "The Horse", "Sports Day in the Park", "The Home for the Elderly" and so forth. The mode that Raine adopted for these flat-sounding topics was not quite naturalistic. And yet, one never came...