Martian Poetry
Quick answer: Martian Poetry is a 1970s British style, named after Craig Raine's famous postcard poem, that describes everyday things through startling alien metaphors.
Martian Poetry is a British poetic style of the late 1970s and early 1980s in which ordinary objects are described as if seen for the first time by a visitor from another planet, producing startling, riddle-like metaphors. The name comes from Craig Raine's 1979 poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, in which a Martian reports on human life, describing books, telephones and bathrooms in wonderfully estranged terms. The critic and poet James Fenton coined the label, and Christopher Reid's collection Arcadia (1979) made him the school's other principal figure.
The style matters because it turned metaphor-making itself into the main event of a poem. Even poets who find it gimmicky have absorbed its central dare: can you make a reader see a kettle, a car park or a wedding as though nothing like it had ever existed before?
How It Works
The method is systematic defamiliarisation. You withhold the object's name and function, then describe its behaviour with scrupulous, literal-minded innocence, as an alien anthropologist might. The pleasure for readers is double: solving the riddle and seeing the familiar thing made strange. A quick original example, describing an umbrella:
Where You Will See It
Raine's postcard poem is the anthology staple, with its books described as mechanical birds with many wings that perch on the hand. Reid's Arcadia applies the same optics to English domestic life. The two poets were sometimes grouped with others as purveyors of a new metaphor-rich manner, and the influence spread widely through 1980s British verse and into classrooms, where the Martian exercise remains a favourite way to teach imagery. Critics of the school argued the poems risked becoming strings of clever comparisons without emotional stakes, a caution worth keeping.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Treat the Martian eye as a training regime rather than a finished style. Pick a mundane object, ban its name and every associated technical word, and describe only what it does. Then, and this is the step the parodies skip, aim the estranged image at a feeling. An umbrella as a bat is a trick; an umbrella as a bat sheltering a child on their first walk to a new school is a poem. Contest judges tend to reward exactly that combination of fresh language and genuine emotion.
What poets can take from this
- Choose objects with visible behaviour, doors, kettles, escalators, since the style thrives on describing action innocently.
- Ban the object's name and its whole word-family before you start drafting.
- Keep the diction literal and calm; the strangeness should come from perspective, not from wild vocabulary.
- Limit yourself to two or three Martian images per poem so each one keeps its shock.
- Anchor at least one image to a human feeling so the poem is more than a riddle.
Try it yourself
Write a postcard home from a visitor who has never seen Earth, describing one room of your house in eight to twelve lines without naming a single object in it.
Questions
Why is it called Martian Poetry?
The name comes from Craig Raine's 1979 poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, which describes human life through an alien's eyes. James Fenton applied the label to Raine, Christopher Reid and poets writing in a similar metaphor-driven way.
Is Martian Poetry the same as defamiliarisation?
It is a specific British application of that older idea. Defamiliarisation, described by Russian Formalist critics, names any technique that makes the familiar strange; Martian Poetry does it through sustained naive metaphor.
Is anyone still writing Martian Poetry?
As a named school it faded by the late 1980s, but its technique survives everywhere, in teaching exercises, riddle poems and any lyric that leans on surprising metaphors for ordinary things.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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