arts

Poem Of The Week: The Grocer By Craig Raine

The Grocer
‘the Kingdom of God cometh not with observation’
(James Joyce to Lady Gregory)

The grocer’s hair is parted like a feather
by two swift brushes and a dab of brilliantine.

His cheesewire is a sun-dial selling by the hour.
He brings it down at four and five o’clock,

the wooden T gripped like a corkscrew.
Greaseproof squares curl in diamonds on a hook.

He takes, and orientates the chock of cheese,
swoops his hand away, leaves it on the choppy scales.

Tortoise-necked, he reads the price aloud
and fingers do their automatic origami.

He shakes the air into a paper bag and,
eggs pickpocketed inside, trapezes it.

Coins are raked with trident hand,
trickled into the till – palm out,

with thumb crooked over the stigma,
he smiles like a modest quattrocento Christ.

The grocer-figure in Craig Raine’s poem is a performance artist, engaging in a Mephisto waltz around his shop's domain. His act is anchored in a version of reality but at the same time it is engineered as a brilliantined, immaculately-coiffed pretence in which the poet is complicit. And to this extent, the exercising of poetic ‘observation’, as the epigraph to the poem suggests, embodies a crooked diversion, a contrived verisimilitude, like the faux-humility of the grocer’s gently messianic demeanour in the witty and highly visual closing couplet.

The grocer’s performative instincts are recreated with metaphorical verve by the poet. Raine’s acuity at exploding detail into significance – his Martian poems broke the mould by using an entirely novel form of observation – breathes new life into the quotidian.

Conferring meticulous drama on the grocer’s preening persona in the detail of his shop – the perfectly cut diamonds of greaseproof, the ‘feather’ parting, the ‘tortoise’ neck, the fingers’ ‘automatic origami’, and the sleight-of-hand magic of the shook bag and concealed eggs – Raine’s eagle-eyed narrator effects his own silent larceny.

‘The Grocer’ is taken from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, published by Penguin (1982).

Also by Steve Whitaker...

Poem Of The Week: Leeds 1975 By Faith Lawrence

The Imp Of Surrealism: Anthony Earnshaw At Dean Clough

Poem Of The Week: Pastoral By Ali Lewis

Along The River's Lines: Hôtel Amour By Deryn Rees-Jones

Poem Of The Week: Machines By Michael Donaghy (1954-2004)