ABSTRACT
In 1979 a collection of poems appeared called A Martian Sends a Postcard Home. The poet, Craig Raine, was the most prominent writer in a loose group whose style was called ‘Martian’ by James Fenton. The title poem of the book (Raine 1979:1–2) is composed of a series of observations of the world and various objects in it—books, mist, rain, cars, watches, telephones, lavatories—not looked at by someone whose vision is jaded by much casual, unfocused looking, for whom ‘the vision splendid…[has faded] into the light of common day’, but seen as though the observer had never seen them before; as though s/he were a Martian; as though, we might say, s/he had an innocent eye, or what Neil Corcoran (1993:235) calls a ‘cleansed perception’, an ‘unprejudiced observation’.
