Craig Raine

Craig Raine Poems

Craig Raine Biography

Craig Anthony Raine FRSL (born 3 December 1944) is an English poet born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, England. Along with Christopher Reid, he is the best-known exponent of Martian poetry. He was a former Fellow of New College, Oxford from 1991-2010 and is now Emeritus professor. He has been the editor of Areté since 1999. Career He taught at Oxford and followed a literary career as book editor for New Review, editor of Quarto, and poetry editor at the New Statesman. He became poetry editor at publishers Faber and Faber in 1981, and has been a fellow of New College, Oxford since 1991, retiring from his post as tutor in June 2010. In 1972 he married Ann Pasternak Slater, a now retired fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. They have one daughter and three sons; Nina Raine is a noted director and playwright. Craig Raine is founder and editor of the literary magazine Areté and a frequent contributor. His works include a number of poetry collections : The Onion, Memory (1978), A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), A Free Translation (1981), Rich (1984), History: The Home Movie (1994), and Clay. Whereabouts Unknown (1996). His reviews and essays are collected in two anthologies: Haydn and the Valve Trumpet (1990) and In Defence of T. S. Eliot (2000). A short critical-biographical study of Eliot, T. S. Eliot: Image, Text and Context, was published in 2007. His friend Ian McEwan argues that Raine espouses: "very strong and clear, almost Arnoldian, ideas of literature and criticism".)

The Best Poem Of Craig Raine

A Martian Sends A Postcard Home

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings --

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside --
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves --
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

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