"Only the young are allowed to suffer / openly. Adults go to a punishment room / with water but nothing to eat. / They lock the door and suffer the noises / alone. No one is exempt / and everyone's pain has a different smell."
The purpose of Craig Raine's Martian poetry is to “defamiliarize” the reader from human understanding and concepts. The Martian's descriptions of human society are as alien to us as our descriptions of the Martian's society would be to the Martian. The descriptions become so foreign it is debatable what the Martian is exactly describing. Is the Martian describing how humans must work every day? Or is this a description of a doctor's office? Adults are allowed “with water but nothing to eat.” It is clear this is a place where some rules must be followed, but the Martian has no concept of why. The possibility is it is an office as children do not go there and “everyone's pain has a different smell.” Everyone's work is different so perhaps, to Martian eyes or nose, it does in fact have “a different smell”.
“At night, when all the colours die, / they hide in pairs / and read about themselves - / in colour, with their eyelids shut.”
The Martian's attempt at describing the concept of human sleep/dreams. When the world becomes dark, or “all the colours die”, human couples go to bed or “hide in pairs”. Then they dream, or “read about themselves”, while they sleep or with “their eyelids shut”. Something as simple as the basic action of sleep seems pointless when described by the Martian. All human activities seem absurd or bizarre when described in such a detached manner. Everything humans naturally assume to be universal knowledge Raine subverts by showing how alien it would be to a creature from another world.
“It is the onion, memory, / that makes me cry.”
Raine's poem “The Onion, Memory” focuses upon the association of sadness, memory, and action. The world to the lover is the poem seems to be an association of events with actions and images. The world he wanders through is a quick as his Romance and ends just as painfully. The emotion is summarized in the familiar action of cutting an onion where memory and action have become so intermixed to be indistinguishable. The lover can not tell if he is crying due to his memories, the action, or it is the onion making him cry. By the end of the poem, the lover stumbles to the wash-line where the past and present are united in the action of a daily, domestic chore. As is common with all things in daily life, the lover “repeat unfinished gestures got by heart.” It is the memory of the onion that makes the lover cry.
“'The Word was Manchester'. / Shhh, shhh, the shovel said. Shhh...”
The concluding line to Raine's poem “In the Kalahari Desert”. The poem depicts a group's slow death in the Kalahri Desert paralleled with a reading of the Bible. Like Raine's other poems, “defamiliarization” is a major technique/aspect of the poem. As the group slowly dwindles, the world becomes far more hostile and unfamiliar. The world of the Kalahri Desert is totally alien to their home of England. Even the Bible, perhaps the most common book in the world, changes as Makololo changes the words within it. The final line concludes with the death of Isabella as the Reverend Rodger Price reads the line Makololo has altered. The shovel's “shh” is Isabella being buried in the unforgiving sands of the desert. A death in a place too far away from Manchester.
