Lorraine Mariner – författare

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.

Lorraine Mariner’s slant humour and eye for the peculiarities of human interactions have won her comparisons to Stevie Smith, that distinctly English poetic sensibility. In Little Anchors, her third collection, Mariner looks below the surface of the ‘quintessential English family’, discovering hidden heritages and family secrets and a new understanding of what it means to belong.She uncovers the Greek heritage that her late father had carefully concealed – like many migrants of his generation – reclaiming both his name and extended family as she travels to get to know them. Alongside is the story of a beloved Irish grandmother, whose institutional and migrant experiences intersect with the troubling ‘herstories’ of twentieth-century Irish culture.A transatlantic love affair brings a new rhyme with her family’s migrations to the US, while London works its magic and draws these strands of identity together again. George Michael, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, Jane Eyre and the longueurs of lockdown also make appearances.Lorraine Mariner’s absorbing new collection is about the little anchors that hold us to people and places and keep us from going adrift.

Furniture, Lorraine Mariner's debut collection, was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize. Her poetry is sharp, quirky and skilful.Praise for Furniture:'Pleasingly direct and conversational, almost aggressively anti-poetic. The poems are spoken in the voice of a young woman who inches her way through a blizzard of bewilderment at life’s unpredictable twists and turns’Tablet