(1944-    ) UK poet whose first book, The Onion, Memory (coll 1978 chap), demonstrated his capacity to illuminate the world through estranged images, a technique which came to full fruition in A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (coll 1979 chap), the title poem of which represents – safely grounded in metaphor – an Alien's tabula rasa vision of normal human activities, and which has come for many to represent an angle of perception central to good sf (and fatally missing from routine work). His libretto for an opera by Charles Osborne, The Electrification of the Soviet Union (1986 chap) is somewhat fantasticated; and "1953": A Version of Racine's Andromache (1990 chap) is a Hitler Wins tale in play form, set in an Italy which, now ruled by Mussolini's son, has conquered England, bombing London flat in the process. His book-length narrative poem, History: The Home Movie (1994), invokes the supernatural, including an astral appearance by Arthur Conan Doyle. [JC]

Craig Anthony Raine

born Bishop Auckland, County Durham: 3 December 1944

died

works

• A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1979) [poetry: coll: chap: pb/from Paul Klee]
• The Electrification of the Soviet Union (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) [opera libretto: chap: pb/from Leonid Pasternak]
• "1953": A Version of Racine's Andromache (London: Faber and Faber, 1990) [play: chap: pb/]
• History: The Home Movie (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) [poem: hb/uncredited]

links

Previous versions of this entry

• 01/01/2005
• 20/12/2011
• 25/02/2012
• 10/03/2012