Eleven Rooms

Eleven Rooms Synopsis

Eleven Rooms, Claire Dyer's first collection, explores contradictions inherent in ideas of the permanent. The poems hold on to what's transient: the moment of a girl on the back of a boy's motorbike - a moment with no start and no end, the exquisite pain of watching children grow up and away, the flex and flux of relationships, and what death takes from us. In these poems, houses and rooms embody this paradox: they are stripped of furniture, demolished and replaced. Yet the idea of the house lives on, while what happened within its walls remains unalterable fact. Claire Dyer's poems tell of an intimate quest for equilibrium in a world constantly tilting: they find joy in the journey, adventure, acceptance and affection for things past; they remind us that although the sand slips through our fingers, we hold it warm and dry a while.