Many Earth-turns ago, a Martian poet (Craig Raine) wrote that books made ¡°the body to shriek without pain¡±. His Martian poetry school blossomed, its seeds scattering throughout the land. Today, the great sage Wiki names it a ¡°minor movement¡± in which things are ¡°described in a strange way¡±. Time, which in Martian poetry is something ¡°tied to the wrist¡±, might be more kind. For Craig Raine still walks among us, a passionate and brilliant observer, and only sometimes shrieking at what he finds here.

In binocular mode, Raine¡¯s book keeps one close eye on poems, always asking ¡°what do they mean¡±, and guiding us carefully through the thickets of text, tone and echo. The other, glass eye ¨C actually it¡¯s Elizabeth Bishop¡¯s grandmother¡¯s ¨C goes ¡°off at an angle¡±, and takes in poetry¡¯s place in culture, arts, politics and, ominously, in the hands of lazy and inept commentators.

It¡¯s a wondrous eye ¨C Raine¡¯s real one ¨C that delights in wandering the poem and, like Robert Frost, getting us a bit lost. Sometimes Raine summons T. S. Eliot to steer us back, his Virgil shadowing us a century after Prufrock. But sometimes we should just jump where Raine jumps. A tour of two paragraphs: Dr Johnson¡¯s grousing about conceits in Abraham Cowley¡¯s verse leads us to epic similes, and to the single, deferred and multiple orgasm; then, refreshed, we visit Longinus, Aristotle and John Dryden on metaphor, and meet Wapichan (¡°a major Guyanese dialect¡±) in which ¡°kadakob, the word for ¡®big-mouthed catfish,¡¯ is sometimes used for ¡®politician¡¯¡±. As Robin Williams would say after an inspired riff, ¡°Keep up!¡±

And Raine¡¯s artificial eye? His telltale gaze dwells on the makers of muddled readings, pointless puzzles, deconstruction and purveyors of what he calls ¡°balonium¡±. Looking for blood in a US election year? Raine¡¯s elect features Josef Brodsky, fake; Christopher Ricks, pun-tormented; F. R. Leavis, moralistic; Glyn Maxwell, can¡¯t scan. The chapter ¡°Getting it Wrong¡± drags the critical works of Sean O¡¯Brien, Tom Paulin and John Carey around the map of misreading. If our walk began with Thoreau, pointing to poetry¡¯s delights, we¡¯re then led by Dante round the murky Circle of Periphrasis.

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The book boils over with catalogues: poetically ¡°accurate¡± kisses compared in E. M. Forster, Anton Chekhov, Seamus Heaney, D. H. Lawrence and F. Scott Fitzgerald; ravens and crows in Milton, Ernest Hemingway, Shakespeare and Ted Hughes. Yet, after his poem Gatwick endured a trial by Twitter for depicting the ¡°two foot span¡± of a lady¡¯s ¡°hefty can¡±, need Raine now list five authors describing women¡¯s behinds as inverted heart-shapes? Further: are W. C. Williams¡¯ stanzas in The Red Wheelbarrow really shaped like wheelbarrows? Is Bob Dylan really the father of rap (cf. The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron)? Shouldn¡¯t W. B. Yeats¡¯ Byzantium be interpreted in terms of his earlier poem (cf. Sailing to Byzantium)?

Raine values precision, and contends that ¡°everything that is important about art is particular¡±, not Frenchified and fuzzy, a labyrinth of ¡°semantic possibilities¡±. His own workings and associations are admirably eccentric; like William Blake¡¯s The Mental Traveller, they show how ¡°the eye altering, alters all¡±. Diverting, because diverted. Yet, when squinting at academic ¡°nursery notions¡±, even Raine¡¯s glass eye can fog with frustration. Robert Frost overprotects his interpretations by demanding: ¡°put a sign up closed to all but me¡±. Is this book¡¯s passion against misreading greater than its passion for poems?

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David Gewanter is professor of English, Georgetown University. His latest collection of poetry is War Bird (2009).

My Grandmother¡¯s Glass Eye: A Look at Poetry
By Craig Raine
Atlantic Books, 224pp, ?25.00 and ?9.99
ISBN 9781848872899 and 9781782397434 (e-book)
Published 10 May 2016