My Grandmother's Glass Eye: A Look at Poetry

By: Craig Raine

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Synopsis: From critic and poet Craig Raine comes a fresh, bold examination of the meaning of poetry and some of the great poetical works of our time"By poetry we—we the masses—mean something vague, something untrue, something uplifting, something beautiful, something so eloquent it isn't for everyday. The word "poetry" is up there with "soul". And I am against it.'Craig Raine's new work of criticism deploys its considerable learning, its intelligent expertise, lightly, wittily, memorably. It is an exercise in demystification and clarity. If you want to know how poetry works on the page, here are sure-footed accounts of particular poems. There is something Johnsonian in Craig Raine's common sense—an elegant wrecking ball used with precision and delicacy to pick off the pretentious, the platitudinous, the over-promoted. Here, poetry is well read, attentively read, by a practitioner whose range runs from Bion to John Lennon, from Bishop to Balanchine.