Craig Raine

“Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on the ground.”

“Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings.”

“But time is a folded map, a flattened globe.”

“In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up.”

“The job of the artist is to defamiliarize, to make the familiar strange.”

“Rain is when the earth is television.”

“Only the young are allowed to suffer openly. Adults go to a punishment room with water but nothing to eat.”

“At night, when all the colours die, they hide in pairs and read about themselves – in colour, with their eyelids shut.”

“Poetry is a kind of linguistic sculpture.”

“The onion, memory, is slowly peeled.”

“A key is turned to free the world for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed.”

“No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell.”