There is a telling moment in How Snow Falls, Craig Raine’s recently reissued collection of poems, at which the poet almost seems to be making fun of himself.  It comes in the middle of his ‘High Table’, a longer ‘film poem’ set in Cambridge, when a young English fellow characterises Lawrence Sterne with these words: ‘Behind the simpering pretence / of sensibility, Larry the Lad— // deliberate dirty-mindedness.’  It actually seems like a pretty decent way of summing up a tendency towards the unsettlingly and perhaps arbitrarily frank and intimate in Raine’s own writing.  It’s an approach that always makes for very readable, engaging writing, but it does seem at times to result in lines included more for the sake of shock value than actual merit: ‘you said you were the same / as Le Pétomane, // and once your c*** started / you couldn’t stop farting’ addressed to a dead lover, for instance, or of tending to his dying mother, ‘Every time a hair was plucked, / she sighed, almost like someone being slowly f*****’. 

Raine is keenly interested in death and processes of decay, and, even at these somewhat cringe-inducing lines, he still clearly has a good eye for effects.  It’s something he gives more obvious treatment in his ‘Ars Poetica’, a pleasant, short poem in which he considers the way effective poetic language works.  His case that poets are ‘ruthless till we feel the fit. // And then we edit out the working’ is illustrated by his own steady manipulation of repeated phrases throughout the poem, and the formation of short chunks of vivid writing that just work in the way that provokes ‘the yes of writers’ he describes is probably Raine’s big strength.  In the eponymous ‘How Snow Falls’, for instance, we hear—continuing the strand of references to illness and decay that runs throughout the whole collection—that falling in love and the falling of snow are signified by ‘the sinusitis of perfume, / without the perfume’; in the stylish and moody ‘Rashomon’, which describes a rape, ‘The bamboo squeezed itself against her flesh / as if the place itself were passionate’, in a perfectly-formed stanza that reads with exactly the right kind of sinister, unsettling sensuality.

On the whole, this is a collection worth exploring. While the more mopey poems do become a little trying at times, Raine has a good eye for detail, and there’s something compelling about the sheer honesty of his expression. If nothing else, he knows how to turn a good phrase.