Description
John Froy’s first poetry collection emerged from his day job as a painter and decorator, and examines his life – childhood, coming of age, marriage – with trademark precision and intensity. Originally published in 2007, this new and revised edition brings these fresh poems from the world of decorating into print again.
Using imagery from house-painting to explore life with subtle psychological and social insight, the poems are filled with a quiet sense of contemplation. They also undermine and blur distinctions between art and craft, manual and intellectual work. We meet the poet as a Ragged-trousered Philanthropist and then imagining himself working alongside the artist Georges Braque (who trained as a decorator). There is a sense of closeness to physical work here, which gives authenticity and freshness. Poems concerned with ‘the trade’, from dry rot in the bathroom – how deep, how far the hungry threads have gone – through ‘the kinked, ballooning pipes’ of old lead water systems, to the heady fumes of VOCs in gloss paint in Escape from Colditz, and the molecular structure of paint, ‘the fish scales of an aluminium primer’.
‘ … subtle psychological and social insight, with a Zen-like sense of contemplation … It subverts common cultural distinctions between craft and art, manual and intellectual work.’ — MALCOM POVEY, SOUTH
‘Here, obtuse blank walls turn into two-way screens displaying the soul’s caravan, while crumbling ledges conjure up liminal spaces where inner and outer realities tussle for position in a deeply-felt magic-lantern show.’ — ELKE ASMUS
‘Crafted with an admirable spareness and welcome transparency, the tension driving these poems has a stealthy and vital force. Reveries on the emancipating thread of routine, pattern; on tenderness borne of commitment, are transformed, in one sensual image, into the passion of a fiercer inner life. Read, and be moved.’ — LISA CHANEY
John Froy. Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, 62 pages, May 2026.
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