Paul Fryer: 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. This is Paul Fryer's first collection of poems, and it has been illustrated with keen insight by Damien Hirst. Together they have produced a beautiful diatribe against current complacencies that, remarkably, also shows a precious tolerance and love for their fellow men and women. The novelist and painter Harland Miller has written the foreword. Hirst and Fryer have concocted an acute distillation of manners, cultures and prejudices, a polemic even, that reflects a light suffused with a powerful disinterest, a disturbing sine qua non. Drinking, fooling with toxic substances, loving and losing and loving again, railing against authority, sinking one's head in one's hands at the ordinariness of life's decisions, these are but part of Don't Be So... It is also, remarkably, a book of love and curious humility. Paul Fryer deconstructs accepted conceits and replaces them with commonplace sensibilities that make you wonder how you ever got dressed in the morning, let alone go out in the world. "I've had tougher dilemmas," Fryer says. "But I do find it a bit embarrassing to talk about the writing of poems. I remember my first effort at primary school; I was nine. It was a cheerful composition entitled 'The End Of The World'. Funnily enough I still know it by heart."