A poem by Craig Raine characteristically begins with a visual electric-shock: "The budgerigar pecks at the millet,/ his beak prised apart like a pistachio nut/ by the fat kernel of tongue" ("Mother Dressmaking"), "Bright as meringues, the swans sweep/ sideways down the passionate water" ("Floods"). In such early poems, the so-called "Martian" technique, the bizarre juxtaposition which makes familiar things strange yet simultaneously more recognisable and affecting, is instantly established.
While recent collections show Raine's eye for the illuminating mis-match undimmed, his images have become less of an end in themselves. In this week's poem, for instance, the delicate title-poem of his latest collection, How Snow Falls, metaphor teases its way toward metaphysics. States of mind and being flicker on the edges of faintly-outlined imagery, so that the reader is following a trail away from the world as well as deeper into it. Cold weather has become a secret-laden metaphor.
The poem begins with a simile, the subject of which will be revealed as "this new coldness in the air." A further mysterious layer of meaning will be added: "the pang/ of something intangible." But "the unshaven prickle/ of a sharpened razor" which the "pang" evokes is itself elusive: the phrase produces a tingle, rather than a specific image.
If the "prickle" is a sensation, how can it be unshaven? If these lines evoke the prickling feeling of not having shaved, where does the razor fit in? Perhaps they refer to a single prickle of hair inadvertently left behind. Does the razor's extra sharpness make the user more aware of the as-yet unshaven remnants of beard?
Disqualified by my own depilatory preferences, I consulted an expert – male, sometime bearded. "When you've just shaved it feels cold, as if there's snow on your face," he said – a lovely image but not, I think, quite the one intended here. However, there's another poem in Raine's collection, "Those No-Doubt-About-It Infidelity Blues", in whose refrain the speaker recalls: "That time my pa shaved off his beard/ The man we knew just disappeared,/ Unnrecognisably himself,/ Which was truly false and falsely weird." Perhaps, in "How Snow Falls," we are similarly being shown something familiar becoming "unrecognisably itself," and the verbal paradox enacts the process.
So we glide further along the metaphorical moving-pavement. What fills our eyes need not simply be the cold. It may be a strong emotion. Again, the poem touches the intangible, and produces a further paradox, the "perfume without the perfume".
The reference to sinusitis is a reminder that "snow" colloquially means cocaine. The poem might encode a further metaphor. The plot thickens – or whitens. Achoo.
In fact, though, the introduction of "love" in the sixth stanza suggests erotic allusions in the fifth. Like the start of a head-cold, perhaps, the very early sensations of love fill the eyes and nose before the "sufferer" has recognised the symptoms. "How Snow Falls" may even be linked to an earlier love-poem, "Perfume": "She left behind/ a fragrant ghost:// the idea of down/ on the ear lobes…"
"Transfiguration" is a word that embraces many possibilities. And it brings us back to real snow. A first snowfall affects most of us with the kind of surprise a poem should create: it makes our world look different. Again, another poem may help shed light. The beautiful phrase "love's exactitude" is mirrored in "Ars Poetica" with its reference to "the nod we" (writers) "give exactitude."
"We fall in love the way snow falls, and the way writers make poems" might be a crude interpretation, but the three-fold analogy is seductive. And it raises the question whether things become more obscure or more clear and real when the transfiguration happens. Both, I think.
Love as ailment is an ancient trope which the poem revitalises with its references to filled eyes, sinusitis, vertigo, and the idea that it's something we "never quite get over." This final assertion feels like a pledge – a lover's and a poet's. "We never quite get over" love or poetry – and neither should we.
"How Snow Falls" is a miniature, its couplets (a favourite Martian structure) spare and compact, its tone tender, tentative and exalted. It's as tactile as it is visual, and the three short, impressionistic sentences are lineated so as to slow, and sometimes pause, the reader's pace, as if we walked on ice – or a razor's edge. It's the prelude to a collection that is actually bold and rangy, celebrating the writer's return, after his "infidelity" with prose fiction, to his long and fruitful marriage with poetry. How Snow Falls contains other snowy poems, and the title might be a statement as well as the offering of an explanation. But the muse is in a far from wintry mood.
How Snow Falls by Craig Raine is published by Atlantic Books, priced £14.99.
How Snow Falls
Like the unshaven prickle
of a sharpened razor,
this new coldness in the air,
the pang
of something intangible.
Filling our eyes,
the sinusitis of perfume
without the perfume.
And then love's vertigo,
love's exactitude,
this snow, this transfiguration
we never quite get over.