The Artist's Room

Jo Slade

In The Artist’s Room, Jo Slade teases out connections between poetry and painting, drawing in particular on her fascination for the Welsh artist Gwen John (1876 - 1939) who lived and worked in France for most of her life.

Exhibiting the precise and patient beauty of one of John’s own paintings, these poems are exquisite meditations on portraiture and vision, vocalising an artist’s sensitivity to light and space and drawing the reader into that paradoxical mixture of anonymity and intimacy which characterises the portraitist’s relation to her model.

Slade has an finely honed ear for the music of language, and these pieces’ powerful sense of expectancy is complemented by understated suspensions and variations in rhythm. Like a well-designed artist’s studio, the collection is infused with light, and invites the reader in with a hushed, elegant sense of intimacy.

36pp ISBN 978-1-906309-11-4
£6 plus £4 p&p