Craig Raine

The Divine Comedy is a fugue and a black comedy. In delicious and bawdy detail, an unnamed narrator offers snapshots into the lives and loves of an astonishing cast of philanderers and fuckups while along the way, the evidence amasses for a comic, cosmic conspiracy. Craig Raine's second novel, The Divine Comedy, is a voyeuristic meditation on sex and insecurity, God and the nature of the human body--its capacity for pleasure and pain, its desires, disappointments, and its many mortifying betrayals.

The Divine Comedy

Haydn and the Valve Trumpet

David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence is known mainly as a novelist and poet but he was also the author of many superb short stories and novellas. By bringing together all his shorter fiction, this volume makes it possible to survey his entire writing career. Together with many celebrated stories - including THE PRUSSIAN OFFICIER, THE VIRGIN AND THE GYPSY, ST MAWR and ODOUR OF CHRYSANTHEMUMS - there are many lesser known but still magnificent pieces which show the extraordinary diversity of Lawrence's talent and also reveal an often forgotten talent for comedy.

Collected Stories

Rudyard Kipling

Selected Poetry

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.

A Look at Poetry

My Grandmother's Glass Eye

What becomes of the broken-hearted? An acclaimed poet and literary essayist's first novel is an exquisite, moving, erotic investigation of love and its painful corollary In Craig Raine's startlingly moving, intellectually nimble, sexually candid, wickedly funny first novel, the central character is not a person, but an invisible metaphor: heartbreak. Through the stories of a virtuoso cast of characters—among them a physically scarred academic, a strangely beautiful young girl with Down's syndrome, a world-renowned actress, and a brilliant Czech poet—the book investigates one of the most elusive yet deeply felt of human conditions. It is a compassionate and textured novel about what happens to us when love and loss collide.

Heartbreak

Because it takes commemoration seriously, Craig Raine's poem extends the boundaries of the elegy. It tries to restore the lost person - in all her beauty, her difficulty, her charm, her formidable complexity, her sexuality, in all her reality.

A la Recherche Du Temps Perdu

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, written when the author was twenty-four, appeared in 1920 and immediately established him as a leading literary figure in the brilliant and dangerous world of 1920s America. The novel tells the story of a spoilt child in search of happiness. Pampered as a child, wealthy, brilliant at school, Amory Blaine looks for the love of others but only finds himself. A short, sharp masterpiece with an intriguing religious undertow, this is also a touchingly autobiographical novel which reflects ominously on Fitzgerald's own future.

This Side of Paradise

The Home Movie

History

The Divine Comedy is a fugue and a black comedy. In delicious and bawdy detail, an unnamed narrator offers snapshots into the lives and loves of an astonishing cast of philanderers and fuckups while along the way, the evidence amasses for a comic, cosmic conspiracy. Craig Raine's second novel, The Divine Comedy, is a voyeuristic meditation on sex and insecurity, God and the nature of the human body - its capacity for pleasure and pain, its desires, disappointments, and its many mortifying betrayals.

Craig Raine's first collection,The Onion, Memory (1977), could be said to have changed the landscape of contemporary British poetry. This, together with his second, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1978) established Raine as the founder of the 'Martian' school where the poet forces us to see the most commonplace objects as miraculous. Raine presented a wholly original view of the modern world further broadened by publicaton of Rich (1984) and his epic verse novel, History: the Home Movie (1994) where the poet illuminates the details of daily lives. This was followed by Clay. Whereabouts Unknown in 1996. The Collected Poems confirms Raine as one of the most influential poets to have emerged in Britain since the war.

Collected Poems, 1978-1999

In his first poetry collection for a decade, Craig Raine addresses themes of transformation in human nature and the natural world and confronts the quiddities of death and sex, memory and desire, commemoration and love. At the core of How Snow Falls are four long poems that explore the possibilities of the form; there are two ardent elegies, one for the poet's mother and one for a dead lover; a sparkling reworking of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's story In a Grove; last a 'film-poem', High Table. These poems are sometimes joyous, often moving, and always turn an unflinching gaze on the world. Taken together, this collection reawakens us to forgotten worlds and gives voice to the hidden language of existence. As Raine writes in 'Night': 'don't give way to drowsiness, poet. / You are the pledge we give eternity / and so the slave of every second.'

How Snow Falls

A selection of literary essays written since 1972, this book addresses in detail the work of Dickens, Donne, T. S. Eliot, Coleridge, Dr Johnson, Betjeman, Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow, James Joyce, and many others. Vigilant, sceptical, mistrustful of consensus, Craig Raine stands in the tradition of poet-critics whose task, as Eliot said, is ‘the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste’.

Haydn and The Valve Trumpet

Ron Mueck

Susanna Greeves

CAC Málaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, 30 marzo-17 junio 2007

A girl

Whereabouts Unknown

Clay

This book is Craig Raine's version of Racine's Andromaque. The inverted commas around the title indicate that Raine's play is not set in an historical 1953, but in a parallel universe where history has been as radically re-written as Racine's text. The author's poetry books include Rich.

A Version of Racine's Andromaque

"1953"

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

This second volume of Chekhov's stories draws from his work of the 1880s and 90s and comprises A Daughter of Albion, An Incident, A Dreary Story, The Duel, The Chorus Girl, Ward 6, The Teacher of Literature, An Artist's Story, My Life, The Darling and The Lady with the Dog.

My Life and Other Stories

More Dynamite anthologizes a wealth of essays by a writer with one of the keenest critical eyes of his generation. Craig Raine - poet, critic, novelist, Oxford don and editor - turns his fearsome and unflinching gaze on subjects ranging from Kafka to Koons, Beckett to Babel. He waxes lyrical about Ron Mueck's hyperreal sculptures and reassesses the metafiction of David Foster Wallace. For Raine, no element of cultural output is insignificant, be it cinema, fiction, poetry or installation art. Finding solace in both literature and art alike, and finding moments of truth and beauty where others had stopped looking, More Dynamite will reinvigorate readers, challenge our perceptions of the classics and wonderfully affirm our love of good writing, new and old. This extensive collection of essays is a crash course in twentieth century artistic endeavour - nothing short of a master class in high culture from one of the most discerning minds in contemporary British letters.

Essays 1990-2012

More Dynamite

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the twentieth century's most famous poet and its most influential literary arbiter, T.S. Eliot has long been thought to be an obscure and difficult poet--forbiddingly learned, maddeningly enigmatic. Now, in this brilliant exploration of T.S. Eliot's work, prize-winning poet Craig Raine reveals that, on the contrary, Eliot's poetry (and drama and criticism) can be seen as a unified and coherent body of work. Indeed, despite its manifest originality, its radical experimentation, and its dazzling formal variety, his verse yields meaning just as surely as other more conventional poetry. Raine argues that an implicit controlling theme--the buried life, or the failure of feeling--unfolds in surprisingly varied ways throughout Eliot's work. But alongside Eliot's desire "to live with all intensity" was also a distrust of "violent emotion for its own sake." Raine illuminates this paradoxical Eliot--an exacting anti-romantic realist, skeptical of the emotions, yet incessantly troubled by the fear of emotional failure--through close readings of such poems as "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and many others. The heart of the book contains extended analyses of Eliot's two master works--The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Raine also examines Eliot's criticism--including his coinage of such key literary terms as the objective correlative, dissociation of sensibility, the auditory imagination--and he concludes with a convincing refutation of charges that Eliot was an anti-Semite. Here then is a volume absolutely indispensable for all admirers of T.S. Eliot and, in fact, for everyone who loves modern literature.

Craig Raine

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