With Cheltenham Festival and Poetry Society prizes and New Statesman Prudence Farmer Awards to his name, Craig Raine seems to have discovered the formula for the winning poem. His typical aha!-effects, the quick sharp thrusts of his couplets and the riddlemaker's precision of his images all suggest an abundance of that gift for ready metaphoric connection which Aristotle thought central to the poetic sensibility. And critical acclaim has not been lacking. (p. 13)

[Loose] couplets are Raine's preferred form; in The Onion, Memory twenty-five of the fifty-two poems are cast in them, and in A Martian sends a Postcard Home the proportion rises steeply, twenty of the twenty-four poems being in these irregular couplets. Elsewhere in The Onion, Memory—for example, in the title poem or 'On the perpetuum mobile'—Raine deploys metrical patterns more closely based on iambs, and often allows rhyme, but in the couplet poems...