billy metcalfe - Goodbye Scarecrow

Goodbye Scarecrow

Goodbye Scarecrow is a book of poems paired with illustrations exploring Scarecrows. The poems were done by a varied group of poets with each of the illustration done in Gouache and Water colour by me.

This book is made up of Billy’s paintings and my poetry in dialogue; but also the poems of others, their voices credited throughout. Each approaches the object from different angles — there are poems about lovers and poems about kindness, poems about nature and about hurt and about failure. One poet told me she was “interested in the frictional speech a shirt stuffed with hay would admit” another that they wanted to “go into the minutiae of materials that make the figure, the wood, the clothes” looking at “this idea of something meaning something until it doesn’t.” Many are looking at bodies; the hatred of, the joy of, all the pleasing inconcinnities. There is, happily, no one way of looking at anything. Billy and I were living together when the bulk of the paintings were done, and they grew and spread around the living room. To my lockdown consciousness what I saw then was their jauntiness — I took hope in their colour, wondering how they kept up their enthusiasm for living and bravery for being, alone in a landscape. To us, much of the why was that — one to the wind, still standing, alright, still.” – Siofra Dromgoole