It's hard to decide where Craig Raine's originality lies. Every poet uses metaphor, and some do so more bizarrely than him. Yet, after only two books, it can be said, of him, as Wyndham Lewis wrote of Auden, that he 'is the new guy who's got into the landscape.' We are beginning to see things in a Martian way ('Martian' is James Fenton's adjective for the Rainian method).

This is a considerable achievement, since Raine bypasses avantgarde battles, while setting style too high among his priorities to be a documentary realist. 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home' is a better book than 'The Onion, Memory,' because it is a concentration of his talent, and an intensification of his mannerisms. He hasn't set out on new paths after his initial success, but decided to tune a shining engine to perfection. To his detractors, the Raine mechanics are...