Max Wallis Modern Love Flipped Eye (Flap pamphlet series no.5) £4.00
This sequence takes a year of finding love and losing it; moving from “All the days to tread till I meet you…” to “Allow yourself this one day / hungover from love”. This is young love, gay love, Facebook love, but pretty universal in the way it works. The poems mostly address “you”, which is sometimes the lover and sometimes the self; but the couple’s first encounter is third person – “Once, / I / met him / under a / vowel filled nightmare” which is structurally necessary to get the reader onto the right sexuality. The importance of pronouns is part of the youthful experience, too: “The words I’m no longer afraid of, / ‘I’, ‘us’, ‘we’.” The poet’s fling with someone else is described significantly with a switch from self-address to a third-person “they” as if it wasn’t quite him, then back again to “Wake in the morning and weigh your heart” for the morning after.
There are some poems that don’t quite work, especially “Hiroshima Vow Towers” which makes the grand connections of public and personal disaster in a kind of overblown haiku style that takes a page and a half, including unnecessary explanation about Hiroshima. The following poem, “I Walk The City At Night To Find You” shows this up with an entirely convincing case of just being and experiencing, and putting it into words. The poems handle the tricky interface of sex and words well, especially through sound-texture combining with the images the words create: “You stir, grab and hold me into the nook, / the slotted jig, the saw of your neck; puck the air with your mouth”. “When A Thief Kisses You, Count Your Teeth” is a great exercise in the lover’s imperative, moving the physicality from “Undo my belt, wrench it until the loops split. Curl it. / Slide down skin-clung trousers” to “Gouge my eyes and add them / to the necklace you wear. Take it all. Everything. Now.”
I must be nearly three times the poet’s age, but that part of young gay love (or any love) hasn’t changed a lot. The social circumstances of being gay have altered, and the internet has developed the social opportunities, but while “Modern love is not told on paper”, the book Modern Love is nevertheless very much on paper (nice production), telling of how “Facebook has updated / but we are still in this state.” Young people still have their experience to live, and they write their poems about it.
…..reviewed by by Peter Daniels