How Snow Falls

Craig Raine

dhj 2010 · Atlantic Books Ltd

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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.'

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Craig Raine was born in 1944 and educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He became editor of Quarto in 1979 and was subsequently Poetry Editor at Faber from 1981 to 1991. He is now a Fellow in English at New College, Oxford, and has been the editor of Areté, the arts tri-quarterly, since 1999. He is the author of six works of poetry, and his Collected Poems 1978-1999 were published in 2000. His verse drama, 1953 was directed by Patrick Marber at the Almeida Theatre in 1996. He has also produced two collections of literary essays and, most recently a novel, Heartbreak, published by Atlantic Books in 2010.