In Competition No. 2923 you were invited to describe an everyday object, in verse, from the point of view of a Martian.

James Fenton coined the term Martian to describe the work of poets such as Craig Raine and Christopher Reid, whose poems cast familiar objects in an unfamiliar light. In his 1979 poem ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ Raine describes books, or ‘caxtons’ as he calls them, as ‘mechanical birds with many wings/ and some are treasured for their markings —/ they cause the eyes to melt/ or the body to shriek without pain…’