Ben Wilkinson

THE SALT BOOK OF YOUNGER POETS edited by Roddy Lumsden & Eloise Stonborough Salt Publishing, October 2011. Paperback, £10.99 The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come. Rachael Allen | Daniel Barrow | Jack Belloli | Jay Bernard | James Brookes | Phil Brown | Niall Campbell | Kayo Chingonyi | Miranda Cichy | John Clegg | Nia Davies | Amy De’ath | Inua Ellams | Charlotte Geater | Tom Gilliver | Dai George | Emily Hasler | Oli Hazzard | Dan Hitchen

The title poem of Lorraine Mariner’s debut volume tells the story of two young women in their twenties: one who has “acquired” a family, home and furniture, the other “who’d only ever known the fully-furnished, / the three white goods”. As both a metaphor for unrealised, misplaced aspirations and an emblem of modern life’s clutter, furniture in the broadest sense is ubiquitous in Mariner’s poems. Many specifically address such objects, intent on uncovering the social significance they embody, as in the complex staff-room politics of “Chair”, or the collapsed Ikea wardrobe of “There is nothing wrong with my sister”. Elsewhere, the cultural detritus of Littlewoods catalogues, CDs, predictive texts and London Lite newspapers grows irritatingly to litter the book with their almost programmatic contemporaneity, though frustration is usually offset by Mariner’s natural, charming and engagingly chatty free verse. The best poems in Furniture tend to be the longest, affording Mariner room