Textile with Birds and Smoke

Drawing from, and reflecting on, the experience of teenage years stilled by illness and pain, for this, her second collection, Keri Finlayson has made poems concerned with the complementarity and tension of movement and stasis. Many of the poems explore the meanings of textile as a weight and as a constant, as covering and as clothing. Some take comfort in the reassuring permanence of trees. Others, by contrast, represent fluidity: the flow of gossip, bird song, nursery rhymes, smoke, speech and scent; things that might move around the still island of the body or the bed. Here poetry is shown to be an attempt to make objects out of all that movement, and all that stillness.