Listening to Paint Dry

Description

Listening to Paint Dry charts the life of a soul sensitive to pathos, to injustice, to the patently ridiculous and the howlingly funny.
Pip Barlow has long been performing his poetry, both as spoken word and song. This comprehensive collection offers readers the chance to experience the full range of his writing, by turns affectionate and angry, rueful and ribald, in his own unflinching voice and in those of the people he feels for.

From ‘I was conceived at Christmas/Nineteen fifty-eight/As the advent bells were ringing/And my folks tempted fate’ to ‘Nought to sixty in sixty years/The bottom is coming up to meet me,’ the poems express not only the life of one man but also the life of much of Britain since the 1960s.

Every step leads to dividing lines
Where painters search for hidden rhymes
Between blue-grey-palette sea and sky
And poets gather words by
Listening to paint dry