How Snow Falls

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.’