Uncompromising concentration distinguishes all the poems in this fourth collection. Do not look to them for comfort, but for an austere, vigorous beauty; the language is both lyrical and taut as a bow string.

The teasing, buoyant images in Ballistics are firmly anchored in visions of too-quiet mornings, droplets of water, cold marble and bare light bulbs. But he now writes, more simply and assuredly than he used to, about the flights of imagination that keep melancholy at bay...

Grain is a mature, distilled volume, at times delicately lyrical, at times playful or surreal. Meanings shift and unfold. A poem might take as a starting point a tin of peaches or an etching of a line of trees, but it always reaches towards something more.

British poet Lorraine Mariner’s first full-length poetry collection is suffused with the loneliness of big city life and drenched in the heartache caused by love’s disappointments.