It takes a formidable arrogance to publish a book of only 40 pages under the title A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, but Craig Raine has always displayed the necessary qualities for such a task. This slim volume, an elegy for a lover, Kitty Mrosovsky, who died of Aids, comes readily adorned with dust-jacket quotes suggesting that Raine can now be ranked alongside Auden, Berryman, Browning and Conrad.
Ian McEwan (himself, surely, mentioned in the text: "our mutual friends/ the Martins, Julians and Ians") provides one of them. Raine's poem cites Conrad's statement that the author should aim to "make you hear, to make you feel...// above all, to make you see". McEwan says that Raine has done this. So does Raine. And certainly, in what Talk magazine considers "one of the great long poems written in English this century", we do indeed see something; even if it is only that "all publishing was corrupt and nasty/ and I should know". The poem was, in fact, first published in Talk and republished in Arete, a magazine edited by... Craig Raine.
All this puff and fluff, though, is merely a welcome distraction from the work itself. Raine, grieving for his lover, and a little worried that she might have left him something more viral than memories, proceeds to reconstruct her in poetry. It's a traditional approach, and his chosen form (uneven and off-rhymed couplets) is not exactly innovative.
Raine has apparently remarked that his poem "remakes what the elegy might be in English". We can be charitable here, and assume that he is joking. There has been no shortage of elegy in contemporary poetry - Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats and Paul Muldoon's "Incantata" stand out in recent years - and though the blurb-writers think reconstructing lost love is a novel manoeuvre, it is not.
Love and grief are obsessive states; writing is, inevitably, a therapeutic process for dealing with loss. The big question is always why the private process should be made public; traditionally, the answer has been that love and grief are such common states that readers will be able to match the poet's consolations with their own. Most poets now address these issues within their writing (Peter Reading: "others' bereavements don't marvel readers... and it's pathetic and mad to address yourself to the dead"; Stephen Romer: "Am I changed or not, if I tell this tale?"). Raine does at one point ask "What has all this to do with anyone else?/ Why all these intimate details?", but the question is rhetorical at best; there is no serious attempt to grapple with it thereafter.
Instead, after an itemisation, throughout the poem, of her body hair (20 chin hairs, nine around the nipples), breasts (large ones, "melons"), eyes (green), legs (shaven; "sleek and sexual as stripped twigs", which surely means not sexual at all), cheekbones ("high"), hair ("dark, brown, fine") and "bush" ("black, smoking"- smoking?), he concludes: "And now I have re-membered you." But poetically, he has precisely dismembered her in a series of synechdoches, the efficient and reductive trope of pornography.
What have been reconstructed are Raine's extremely mixed feelings about a woman whose work he seems not to have liked, whose musical ear was dodgy, who "fucked everyone", whose "cunt" and "arsehole" receive more attention in his poem than her face and who was - a breathtaking accusation from Raine - "a literary snob".
The rest of the poem comprises Raine's memories of the affair - times, places, restaurants, even his own witticisms ("you laughed at my joke", he recalls happily) - rendered in couplets which are occasionally vivid or clever, but more often descend into banality or bathos ("I can't accept you're dead./ You're still here, in my head"; "Had been taught Sidney (not Wyatt)/ by 'the writer, Antonia Byatt' ").
Half-rhymed irregular couplets can be a remarkably effective vehicle for combining narrative and reflection: Stephen Romer's Idols, about the process of grief and writing after a love affair, is a truly fine example of this, while its allusions to art and literature are worked into the architecture of the volume rather than merely furnishing it. Raine, a writer who first gained attention with the overtly contrived metaphors of A Martian Sends A Postcard Home, is surprisingly flat in this poem, which periodically seems to aspire to prose.
"Details that make the reader cringe /will make the reader see,/ see the self you showed to me", Raine writes. But it is not the details that make the reader cringe, so much as the execution. Poor Kitty Mrosovsky, hectored post mortem by a self-regarding Raine, unable to answer back; poor readers, witnessing this, lectured at obliquely. In his descriptions of what seems to have been, by and large, some less than excellent intercourse, he says "You taught me sex/ was conversation and not a speech". This, one suspects, is a lesson the implications of which Raine has not quite mastered yet.