And Lorraine Marriner’s poems do just that. Her words have been inspired by the music she grew up with, from Dylan to Costello, by the London Underground’s “Poems on the Underground” and now through her current day job as a librarian in the South Bank’s Saisons Poetry Library where she is surrounded by the words of the world’s poets.

Lorraine did, however, confess to getting “poemed- out on occasions” and going on “poetry retreat in that I make myself have some poetry free days”. Her poems combine comedy and tragedy, the two sides of the human condition, with an everyday normality that is both refreshing and stimulating dealing with the ordinary concerns and situations of life and finding inspiration in family and friends and in the landscape of London. Her answer to whether she is an urban or landscape poet was “Urban, absolutely … the ways of the countryside feel very alien” though living next door to Greenwich Park probably gives her the best of modern city life!

I read her collection Furniture after hearing her read from it and was immediately captivated by an ability to merge complex thoughts, feelings and situations in an accessible framework, almost as though she is telling a story. She is the sort of poet who invites you into to her word world and wants to share the experiences. In Furniture, her first collection, there is a poem called Thursday which is of particular importance to her as it deals with her experiences of the 2005 London bombings. It manages to hold together the everyday and the horrendous as they collide the poem, arranged on the page as a block of text “to look like monument”, is her memorial to the day.

The poem reminded me of the Auden poem, Musee des Beaux Arts, which describes the fall of Icarus as an event that happened on an ordinary day where ordinary lives were being lived. In her latest anthology, There Will Be No More Nonsense, she includes the poem When My Brother Broke which blends a domestic event, the breaking of a favourite doll, with the bigger issues of female image and expectations iced with a gentle layer of wicked humour as one realises the sister has the upper hand.

Recently Interestingly Lorraine has been “dabbling” in screenplays something I can empathise with- poetry, screenplay and play writing both require, I think, an ability to deliver a large picture in a contained space and need to appeal to a visual element.

I am sure, however, that whatever directions her words travel she will continue to pursue her themes with a wry sense of humour and a natural empathy. So if you got a Christmas book token spend it on one or both of her collections.