A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

by Craig Raine

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.

Genres: Poetry

54 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Poet and critic Craig Raine was born on 3 December 1944 in Bishop Auckland, England, and read English at Exeter College, Oxford.

He lectured at Exeter College (1971-2), Lincoln College, Oxford, (1974-5), and Christ Church, Oxford, (1976-9), and was books editor for New Review (1977-8), editor of Quarto (1979-80), and poetry editor at the New Statesman (1981). Reviews and articles from this period are collected in Haydn and the Valve Trumpet (1990). He became poetry editor at the London publishers Faber and Faber in 1981, and became a fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1991. He gained a Cholmondeley Award in 1983 and the Sunday Times Writer of the Year Award in 1998. He is founder and editor of the literary magazine Areté.

His poetry collections include the acclaimed The Onion, Memory (1978), A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), A Free Translation (1981), Rich (1984) and History: The Home Movie (1994), an epic poem that celebrates the history of his own family and that of his wife. His libretto The Electrification of the Soviet Union (1986) is based on The Last Summer, a novella by Boris Pasternak. Collected Poems 1978-1999 was published in 1999. A new long poem A la recherche du temps perdu, an elegy to a former lover, and a collection of his reviews and essays, entitled In Defence of T. S. Eliot, were both published in 2000. Another collection of essays, More Dynamite, appeared in 2013.

Craig Raine lives in Oxford. His latest books are How Snow Falls (2010), a new poetry collection; and two novels, Heartbreak (2010), and The Divine Comedy (2012).

Reviews

[meadow · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not very good at reading poetry, so I'm not very good at writing about poetry. Raine makes great use of, uh, unconventional? language to paint vivid pictures (from "In the Mortuary" - "Life soft cheeses they buldge/sidesways on the marble slabs"). So, the poems have a certain obscurity that forces the reader to try to "get" them. But it's unlike the obscurity of some of, say, Ezra Pound's poetry. Indeed, Craig rarely gets too caught up in making too many references, and when he does, the reader who misses the references can still get a lot out of the poems.

Overall, the poems have a certain combination of light-hearted style with occasionally darker undertones, and maybe this is why I was at times reminded of Richard Brautigan. Except, you know, if Brautigan was a Martian sending a postcard home.

[L.B. Sedlacek · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title poem introduces readers, so to speak, to the Martian poetry movement which isn’t necessarily sci fi poems but instead writing as if you are a Martian observing things in a new way for the first time. That’s my interpretation of it at any rate. The tithe poem is my favorite. Raine’s other poems in this collection will maneuver you through many different things with quite unique perspectives. I discovered the title poem and then read the book. The title poem won a prestigious award and deservingly so. These are good poems.

[Jim Agustin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first book by Craig Raine that I read. The world he showed me was so alien that it took me a long while to understand his work. I was in my first year at university and none of his work was included in the curriculum, so I felt I was on my own trying to crack a mysterious code that would reveal a whole new universe. Looking back, I am glad I persisted.

I know this is not a proper review of the book, I'm still waiting for my own personal copy to arrive delivered by a UFO. :)

[Benjamin Stahl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a neat little poem - (written from the perspective of the title "martian") - detailing the everyday habits and behaviours of human beings, only without the slightest contextual understanding or ability to identify. Three stars only because, well shit, I'm not a major fan of poetry.

[Patrick Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was good but I didn't love it, mainly due personality and desire rather than abstract 'quality'.


The verse feels kinda soft and warm, like a tribble or like the 1970's. It's quite fleshy and tactile and somewhat granola-feeling. And warm, and sad, a little decadent and self-involved but in a slightly hairy hippyish way rather than ice and sheen.#

Most of these are about encoding time slices or points of life into these semi-cryptic textual moments that you are intended to both feel and decode.

"Ribbish smokes at the end of the garden,
Cracking its knuckles to pass the time."

Its a bit knowing and a bit clever and I don't really care about Craig Raines life, I think those are the parts that I didn't like.

In pure word-use, the art of it, that is the part I liked most.

The alienating sense I got from the first poem, 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home', and which I liked, and which is what attracted me to the book, never really re-occours. It becomes more human as the pages turn, we are drawn into Craigs encoded moments.

Many of these are dark moments, little black mysteries encoded twice in the text, first when you unknot the verse in you head and then again when you unroll the scene it presents and hold it up against the tapestary of the imagined world it implies.

We got your holocaust themes, we got your mental illness and aging themes.

The prose and euphony; he's certainly doing something. It's soft. Like most modern poetry the structure of sound is either too soft for me to hear or not there at all.

It's not necessarily bad. It seems likely that he set out to achieve everything he intended, I'm just not a big fan of what he intended.

I like strong Euphony, facing-outward themes, structured verse, more alienation but less introversion.

Well, that's all I got. 3 out of 5. This is certainly a five star book for other people.

[Mark Friend · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only started reading Craig Raine’s ‘ A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ with the previous knowledge of the title poem. Once again, I am prompted to revisit the pleasure of building an affinity with another poet’s work - as I moved through this collection, gathering a glowing sense of their voice, style, and subject matter with each new poem.

This collection felt something akin to an art exhibition - eclectically capturing the particular. There are snapshots of personal occasions – time and place specific - whilst still suggesting the universal in the poems:Flying to Belfast, 1977’, A Journey to Greece, and ‘The Meteorological Lighthouse at O-‘. There are the vignettes like ‘In The Dark’, and ‘The Trout Farm’. There are also portraits and still lives amongst them.

Collectively, they represent the diversity of the poet’s observations of travels, lighthouses, hospitals and trout farms etc, all with a fresh intention, and behind these crafted images lies a brutality and honesty.

Indeed, I felt a similar pleasure to my first reading of Philip Larkin – with the Martian as a distant observer, slightly removed from the mainstream, seeing the everyday in a freshly tilted fashion. I’m glad I took the trouble to hunt down a copy.

[Lucy_k_p · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry is very difficult to review, because responses to poetry are so individual. What evokes deep emotions to one person will be meaningless to another. I've tried to explain why I like particular pieces, and what techniques the poet used to achieve the effect they had on me. I've found by writing this that I've gained a new appreciation for the poems that I liked, as I thought more about why I liked them.

I bought this book on the strength of part of a poem by the author that I read in an anthology, the poem that gives its title to the whole book: 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home'. The lines that impressed me were:

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.

If, like me, you are a bit of a book nerd, you will probably at some point picked up the information that William Caxton was the man who brought the printing press to England. I thought calling books Caxtons was very clever, and that the rest of the description was evocative and imaginative.

The rest of the poem described other everyday things from the eyes of an alien trying to understand their purpose just by watching humans use them and react to them. All of them were weird, slightly surreal and very inventive (The descriptions of a telephone and dreaming were my other favourites), but clear enough to deduce with a little thought. It really felt like the poem was written from an alien viewpoint.

When reading poetry I first read the poem silently to myself, then I read it aloud. I've found this helps me get a clearer understanding of the meaning and what the author was trying to say. Sometimes, even if I don't understand or am not particularly moved by a poem, the sound and rhythm of it can still be beautiful.

'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home' is my favourite poem in the book, and there are 5 others that provoked a response, but I was basically indifferent to the majority of the verses. The book is slightly disappointing as there is nothing else as creative as 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home', and most of the poems are of a different style and theme.

Of the few poems that jumped out at me and made me think, none of them have stayed with me in the month or so between originally reading the book and writing this review; I had to refer back to the book to refresh my memory. (By contrast 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home' was stuck in my head for ages after the first time I read it).

'In the Dark' is my second favourite poem in the collection. It is about a teenage girl who is coerced into sex, gets pregnant and then tries to commits suicide. I found it moving and compassionate, making a point that needed to be made about the unfairness of blaming her for what happened. It was devastating, focusing on descriptions of her actions, letting the reader infer for themselves the emotions she must be feeling.

Brought by the police, her father

listened in his dressing-gown.
She wouldn't come out of the river

or give up the shoe-box
under her arm.

I liked 'Sexual Couplets' because the images used to evoke the relevant body parts were humorous but strangely appropriate once you thought about them. For example "one excited watering can, one peculiar rose..." and "I am wearing a shiny souwester; / you are coxcombed like a jester...". It is the only poem that rhymes, and that drew my attention to the description that ended each line, emphasising them.

'The Trout Farm' contained the a pair of lines that struck me: "Death is a young Elizabethan lad / who shambles across the yard". It was a very vivid image, and the rest of the poem is also very powerful in its description of the death of the fishes. It ends with the boy offering the narrator a cigarette, and I thought the unspoken implication of a link between this action and the other actions of the boy in the poem, all of which bring death, was effective.

While I was not quite sure what the entire poem had to say, 'Laying a Lawn' contained a lovely metaphor for putting down new turf, which produced a great mental image:

I carry these crumbling tomes
two at a time from the stack

and lay them open on the ground.
Bound with earth to last.

I always love book metaphors.

The rhythm and alliteration in 'Shallots' made it great fun to read aloud: "Seven striped shallots are giving / a silent recital on their sitars".

I'm glad I bought the book because liking 6 out of 24 poems isn't bad (In fact it's a 25% success, which is more than I was expecting), and it's worth it to have discovered 'In the Dark'. However, as I said before, what poetry you like is very personal, so I wouldn't really recommend buying this book to anyone else unless they were already familiar with some of Raine's work and wanted to read some more. I have found a copy of 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home' online if anyone wants to see what they make of it. See if you can work out what all of the things the Martian describes are.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

I sort of wandered into this expecting to hate it & it's not exactly upended me but it's better than I'd expected. Title poem is good but the gimmick gets old throughout the collection. trying to work out the holocaust motif

[Eli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this poem!

[Fleur Booth · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read this in one sitting and there were lines that caught my attention but overall not my kind of voice i like in poetry. the first poem’s fame is warranted though

[Fátima Fernandes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A ideia genial, de apresentar a Humanidade vista por um "outsider", por exemplo um hipotético marciano que manda um postal para casa, chegou a dar origem a um movimento poético, embora efémero. Alguns poemas são brilhantes. Outros nem tanto.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25

[Saara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to think for a moment before deciding whether to give this book two rather than three stars, but in the end, the scales were tipped over. Certainly liked the titular poem (which was also the first in the collection), and a few others—but feel rather uncultured for being unable to see the brilliance that the back cover is touting with such great enthusiasm. Perhaps I ought to have read these poems in different circumstances, as I'm the first to admit that my brain is not at its best in the middle of the night while sitting on a train. Perhaps I shall return to this author later for another look. As far as recommendations go, I couldn't say one way or the other. If you're a friend of poetry, why not the read the collection and see what you think. This is, after all, not a very thick book.

[Rich Law · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a lot of imaginative imagery in this collection, reframing the familiar with an unfamiliar perspective, but for me the poems didn't do much else. The imagery or tone of the poems aren't ambiguous enough to stay with you and the poems feel more like observations and descriptions than an experience in and of themselves. They seem to lack an emotional resonance. I think the poem's strength - the use of figurative language - turn out to be their worst enemy. The collection seems so concerned with surfaces and the polishing of the surfaces to give them new shine that the inner life of the poems go unexplored.

[Rose]

Top pick up lines:

"Oh, my strangely gutted one,
the fish head needs your flesh around its bone..."

"I am wearing a shiny souwester;
you are coxcombed like a jester..."