A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

The title poem (which won the Prudence Farmer Award) is in some ways a key to the rest of the poems in this book: a uniquely innocent eye presents an odd and beautiful version of the earth, while glimpsing, almost accidentally, the sad variety of human experience. Similarly, ‘Down on the Funny Farm’ offers a guileless comic vision that is finally displaced by a sombre view of commonplace human tragedy, seen obliquely in a new-laid egg and a battered kitchen bowl. In ‘Oberfeldwebel Beckstadt’, it is only when the sergeant major’s experience is refracted through his wife’s innocent eye that he truly realises the damning significance of what he has done. She brings it home to him. The word ‘home’ sounds through the poem, and throughout the collection, which demonstrates Craig Raine’s uncanny ability to present the homely in a dazzling light and to domesticate the extraordinary.