Craig
Raine - How Snow Falls
Raine prizes the ugly, the
deformed, the unpoetic – regarded often in their
metaphysical aspect – over the inane, self-complacent suavities of
a certain metropolitan literary culture. And this stance has proven
to be the defining quality of most of his output: a democratising
vision, a narrow-eyed rejection of the Parnassian mode. He submits
the body to scrutiny with a watchmaker's loup – is hospitable in
his poetry to its pitted imperfection, its oils and flaws. But it
seems like rote performance, more often than not: a trick, a bit of
verbal legerdemain. Of discursiveness there's very little, and a
typical Raine poem abstains from the nervy self-justification that
clots the line of other poets – each is an ideogram, the
self-consuming artefact that is its own argument. His 'Martianism'
has always secretly sought to deflect and discomfit criticism. A
poem's thisness must have the ungainsayability of an object,
of a material fact that you can no more unpack than a toadstool. The
celebrated early poem, 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home', arrests
Raine in the fixative of achieved style:
Caxtons are mechanical birds
with many wings,
and some are treasured for
their markings -
Such effects require a certain
succession of readerly readjustments, so fine as, when we 'get' it,
quickly become imperceptible – like learning to juggle, the
difficulties of the outset vanish into virtuosity. (We're not to be
detained over the question of how the Martian availed itself of the
cultural-historical datum of 'Caxton' as in the inventor of the book,
while he is unaware of the lexical one of 'book' – the periphrasis
tends to disintegrate if we examine it too closely.) Raine's
miniaturism is underwritten by a kind of exultant attentiveness to
the unremarked blebs and flecks on the surface of the world. Like
his admired John Updike, whose hyperthrophied noticings make for an
art bristling with contingent stuff, Raine suggests our blockish
automatism – and insensitivity to the phenomenal world in which we
find ourselves – has an implied ethical dimension. “I am the
steward/of her untold wealth,” he has it in the poem 'Rich', with
'she' as Nature, perhaps, “keeper of the dictionary,/treasurer of
valuables,//accountant and teller,/and I woo her with words/against
the day of divorce.” This view of the matter might be
unexceptionable – but when it appears to license Raine to document
the private humiliations of family and friends (notably in his
elegies to his mother and former lover Kitty Mrosovsky), and to, in
effect, ransack intimacy for creative capital, the high-minded
pungency of his position errs dramatically into the grotesque. The
long poem À la
récherche
du temps perdu, republished in How Snow Falls (and
book-ending the poem about Raine's mother's death), overbrims with
illicit life, wrought in a fit of dislike, bafflement and tenderness.
But critics (among them Sarah Maguire) found its openness cynical
and, yes, rather ugly. It is a catalogue raisonnée
of human suffering – but it's free inventorying of the dead woman's
body, her sexual exploits, raised hackles. (The squeamishness was
rehearsed a generation before, when Robert Lowell composed a poetry
collection from the private papers of friends and lovers.) Raine
would doubtless insist that there's no sense in glozing the parts of
life we find disagreeable. And would endorse Auden's opinion that,
although we want a poem to be 'a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless
world of pure play,' we also want it “..to be true, that is to say,
to provide us with some kind of revelation about our life which will
show us what life is really like, and free us from self-enchantment
and deception, and a poet cannot bring us any truth without
introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the
disorderly, the ugly.” And yet, and yet. There's something to be
said for reticence.
Against the day of divorce:
in a phrase, the nub of Raine's salvatory aesthetic, never so flatly
stated, but informing his poetry and extenuating maybe the
distressing candour of the poetry dealing with the death of loved
ones. Each image, each line granted its specific weight is a refusal
of death's wholesale erasure – to be dead is to no longer to feel
in our nerves and sinews and on our skin the vibrant presence of the
world (Raine's work an extended palinode to Larkin's 'Aubade'); and,
cumulatively, what we have in the end is a secular prayer to the
superabundance of life, its interrelatedness, the gap between
perceiving subject and the object perceived roundly abolished. It's
a natural theology, tricked out with mild scepticism, but happy to
countenance the shabby unfinishedness of things and our humbling
belatedness.
The early poetry drew its vigour
and interest from the stylistic kinks that Raine tosses up, where
he'd gone some way to rehabilitate the simile – no longer
ineffectually decorative, but a device that stood for a particular
way of engaging with the world. And what's notable about his output
as a whole is that this deft jugglery has remained its chief
characteristic. Formal experiment interests Raine very little:
technical élan has never
been part of his repertoire; and the triplets and clipped quatrains
that are like so many pendants to his ways of seeing reoccur from
start to finish. Not minimalism – not the wire-drawn brevities of
the postwar Eastern European poets - but a dedication to a kind of
obsessive poetic microscopy. Language as a tweezer, plucking out
details like so many ingrown hairs. Once in a while Raine lays out
the principles of his own art, and the art he especially admires:
“Good writing is a criticism of life: it describes, selects,
contemplates defining features, beauties, flaws; it puts reality on
pause; it searches the freeze frame; it is an act of measured
consideration, of accurate re-presentation.” Italicized
reality, as he has it. Yet the question of what such a pause can
yield in terms of meaning and significance – whether the hors
texte can finally instruct us in anything at all, even if put
under the fiercest scrutiny – dogs Raine's poetry. A cow sipping
from a pond, “..her snooker table, torn,/where only one
player/attends to a solitary red.” - what licences Raine to this
figurative fancy, that seems no more telling than a metaphorical
scribble? Once we 'see' that the player is an angler, what then? If
it seems a mite inconsequential, that's because it is.
How Snow Falls is Raine's
first collection in a long while – À
la récherche
was published in stand-alone book format a decade ago. (A poet's
parsimony usually hints at the expectation that a new volume will be
an 'event'.) The title poem rehearses the fractured imagism of his
recent work, the sensuous dédoublement
between natural phenomena and the state of the soul: “And then
love's vertigo,/love's exactitude,//this snow, this
transfiguration,/we never quite get over.” The 'exactitude'
comprises precision of observation and feeling – our gift of
registering the impalpable and making it articulate, something that
can usefully be passed from hand to hand. Yet 'How Snow Falls' is
unusually blurred for a Raine poem. Its verbal singularity is
undercut by the uncertainty of its occasion. Elliptical,
undemonstrative, it seems to claim its metaphysical cachet without
earning it first. Raine wants to record a moment of vision, but some
scruple turns him from it.