Diario de un peón

When the work on the scaffolding to convert an old shoe factory into a luxury residential building does not leave him completely exhausted, for six months Thierry Metz records his impressions and meditations in his diary in soft, laconic, condensed prose. to the maximum, as if the poet reserved his strength to mechanically repeat the same gestures in the work. However, with the help of Metz, this economization of the word is translated into a prodigious wealth of images in which, between the crudeness, the brutalization, the alienation, the prosaic nature of the task and the slow passing of a few hours ("The erosion of a dolmen is more active than the passage of time in the work") besieged by fatigue ("Shoes that would like to shout their fatigue from the four winds"), daydreams and observations about the course of the seasons, the sky, the clouds, the rainbow, the robins and the swallows, the camaraderie, the laughing hands and the soothing silence of midday breaks or weekends, when "the only song you hear is that of the red and blue pencil bird" perched on a leaf. Diary of a Peon is, furthermore, an indispensable text due to the place it occupies in so-called proletarian literature.