My Grandmother's Glass Eye

'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.' My Grandmother's Glass Eye deploys its considerable learning, its intelligent expertise, 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.

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 an emeritus Fellow at New College, Oxford, and has been the editor of Areté since 1999. He is the author of three collections of literary essays, six works of poetry and two novels, Heartbreak and The Divine Comedy, published by Atlantic Books. His Collected Poems 1978-1999 were published in 2000 and his verse drama, '1953' was directed by Patrick Marber at the Almeida Theatre in 1996. He critical study T. S. Eliot was published in 2007.