Lorraine Mariner has long been one of the less well-guarded secrets in UK poetry, and her many admirers will be delighted by the appearance of her first full-length collection. Sometimes reading like an unholy alliance of Dorothy Parker, Stevie Smith and Frank O’Hara – but more often like nothing the reader will have encountered before – Mariner’s poetry is sharp, quirky, disarming, disorientating, deceptively skilful and frequently hilarious. Her gift is to reveal how much of the everyday is purely surreal, and to articulate the strange and fleeting thoughts we often have, but rarely have the nerve or quick-wittedness to voice. Furniture is the work of an exciting and fresh new imagination in contemporary poetry.
