Eggshell: A Decorator's Notes

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. There is a sense of closeness to physical work here, which gives authenticity and freshness. The first section, Gloss, is 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’.

We meet the poet as Ragged-trousered Philanthropist and then imagining himself working alongside the artist Georges Braque (he also trained as a decorator). The more fragile second section, Eggshell, looks at a troubled childhood, divorce, and death, often through the medium of decorating.