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Don't Be So...
Damien Hirst provides the illustrations for Paul Fryer's first collection of poems, the two minds meeting in the middle as they survey their lives and those of their fellow men and women with an acute distillation of manners, cultures and prejudices. Drinking, fooling with toxic substances, loving and losing and loving again - the components of life in its fullness and beguiling ordinariness.
168 pages, Hardcover
First published July 2, 2002
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 5, 2021
Poetry not up to the big household name illustrator Damien Hirst later became
The thought of you is like
Putting a screwdriver in between my front teeth
And snapping them
- The destroyer of things
Happened to stumble upon this book at the secondhand bookshop and having quite a liking to the work of Damien Hirst picked it up. Paul Fryer himself actually ended up quite a striking artist in his own right (https://theforestmagazine.com/2014/01...), but poetry is certainly not his forte.
Sometimes the rhymes are so simple it feels like satire, like sown/grown, trees/bees and gnome/home, in one poem in rapid succession.
Death and some kind of relationship with god come back a lot, maybe best in For My Father, that describes a funeral of apparently the father of the author in a beautiful way.
Overall Don't Be So... gives met the vibes of watching Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind in dreariness and early 2000’s feel and some of the twists are fun, like:
I don’t hold grudges
The hold me
- He’ll grow out of it
Or slightly prescient to the later sentiment about bankers, after 2008:
The big glass banks we’re always someone else’s church
- Northern English Sixties Baby (part one)
The collages of Damien Hirst have eyes, skulls and pills, vague shapes of his later body of work, already coming back.
His Margrite inspired rendition for the titular poem is quite good and his work in general is the highpoint of this bundle: http://www.slow-words.com/dont/
The thought of you is like
Putting a screwdriver in between my front teeth
And snapping them
- The destroyer of things
Happened to stumble upon this book at the secondhand bookshop and having quite a liking to the work of Damien Hirst picked it up. Paul Fryer himself actually ended up quite a striking artist in his own right (https://theforestmagazine.com/2014/01...), but poetry is certainly not his forte.
Sometimes the rhymes are so simple it feels like satire, like sown/grown, trees/bees and gnome/home, in one poem in rapid succession.
Death and some kind of relationship with god come back a lot, maybe best in For My Father, that describes a funeral of apparently the father of the author in a beautiful way.
Overall Don't Be So... gives met the vibes of watching Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind in dreariness and early 2000’s feel and some of the twists are fun, like:
I don’t hold grudges
The hold me
- He’ll grow out of it
Or slightly prescient to the later sentiment about bankers, after 2008:
The big glass banks we’re always someone else’s church
- Northern English Sixties Baby (part one)
The collages of Damien Hirst have eyes, skulls and pills, vague shapes of his later body of work, already coming back.
His Margrite inspired rendition for the titular poem is quite good and his work in general is the highpoint of this bundle: http://www.slow-words.com/dont/
Displaying 1 of 1 review