How Snow Falls

Craig Raine

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781848872868
• eBook ISBN: 9780857892508
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.'

A la recherche du temps perdu

like a thing that falls through water, she passes away...

– Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’

So I turn to a dead language again:

ineo, I go into, enter, begin.

Doleo, I am in pain, I grieve.

and everyone thinks I am being brave.

Ignis, ignis, masculine, fire:

at St Pancras Crematorium, I stare,

light-headed with caffeine,

at the light-oak coffin,

wondering what I feel, where I stand.

Vulnus, vulneris, neuter, a wound.

I watch the coffin vanish

to Mozart on tape, its varnish

about to come up in blisters

and burst into a boa

of full-length, rustling fire,

just as we reach the Dies Irae.

Sinews shrink from the flames.

Sinews shrink in the flames.

I sentimentalize

and then revise.

Iter, itineris, neuter, a journey.

Without end. Where the road is empty.

Sine plus ablative, without.

The words are in my mouth

but I can’t teach myself

the simple, difficult lesson of grief.

Too terrible to learn. Too hard

to have the words by heart.

I can’t accept you’re dead.

You’re still here, in my head:

irritating, prickly, unsalved,

unsolved, unlovable, loved.

That bubble at the corner of your mouth.

Which seems somehow to mean so much.

Sometimes unlovable.

Not always. And always beautiful.

Except for your beard,

which you hated, and I adored.

Which neither of us spoke about.

I was kept quiet

by your behaviour.

You behaved as if it wasn’t there.

Whereas it was, one of the facts,

like the long guard hairs on a fox.

Twenty. Just under the chin. Peroxide

let them flourish in disguise.

Or you clipped them with fine scissors,

made in Germany, curvilinear,

kept at the back of a drawer –

hidden, but not hidden, like the hairs.

Almost oriental when they grew back:

tiny, shining, sparse, glint-black

like surgical stitches.

Tweezers raised unsightly blotches.

A student I taught Wyatt and Surrey

dropped his tweezers in my study,

a flinch of light in the carpet pile.

His nose was heartily male.

‘They fle from me that sometyme did me tweke.’

Hypocrite, you laughed at my joke:

we never talked about any of this

until, after we split, electrolysis

also took permanent care

of all nine of your nipple hairs.

We were in bed together,

talking like sister and brother.

For once. Your black boyfriend

objected to them, so that was the end.

I said, the guy’s got to be mad.

Those things were a turn-on, I said.

And they were.

Your long glowing nipples shabby with hairs.

Big tits, you laughed. Men love melons.

Size. They might as well be melons,

for all the pleasure I feel.

They do nothing for me at all.

What has all this to do with anyone else?

Why all these intimate details?

You introduced me to Conrad’s fiction.

The Nigger and its introduction,

which says the writer makes things real.

His task: ‘to make y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• How Snow Falls
• I Remember My Mother Dying
• Rashomon
• In Hospital
• Night
• La Medica Harkevitch
• Three Poems after Willem Van Toorn
• Words Upon the Window Pane
• A Festive Poem for Albie Marber
• 51 Ways to Lose a Balloon
• Ars Poetica
• Venice
• Those No-Doubt-About-It Infidelity Blues
• Davos Documentary B and W
• L. F. Rosen: Three Poems
• Marcel's Fancy-Dress Party
• High Table
• For Pat Kavanagh
• On the Slopes
• A la recherche du temps perdu
• Acknowledgement