Keri Finlayson

Rooms Keri Finlayson

Keri Finlayson's first collection Rooms finds its centre in the etymology of the words camera, a chamber and stanza, a resting place. Both are forms of enclosure, of inclusion and exclusion that forge definition and force choices over the stories we want to be told and the stories we want to see. Rooms develops two intertwining narratives. In the first, the poet remembers and reimagines her grandmother as a young woman, and the family stories that surrounded her. Exploring the notions of editing and stitching, patterns and limits, it describes her seduction during the making of a silent film in Cornwall in 1919. The second concerns the history of film from the depiction of multiple movement in early cave painting, through the invention of the camera obscura, to The Jazz Singer; the first "talkie." What is a history of technology and a story of seduction and violence, is also a collection of stanza about camera, rooms about rooms.