Craig Raine has given us the very opposite to a Collected Poems—six poems [that make up the volume A Free Translation]…. Because I consider him the most exciting new poet of the decade, the booklet is well worth absorbing and discussing. His talent for seeing the world anew by means of a precise image is as fine as ever: he watches a man rowing "knit / with clumsy oars, / While the waves / unravel their length", and the circus giraffe "manipulates its jib / like an Anglepoise / awkwardly precise." In this group of poems he has settled to a fixed rhythmic pattern, three-line stanzas—or hardly stanzas, rather breath-groups—with no rhyme and no metrical regularity: an easy-going movement into which the poems fit comfortably. Perhaps too comfortably: one hopes he will begin to experiment in metre in a way that will match his experiments in metaphor.

Unsympathetic readers of...