Wayne Holloway-Smith's second book-length book of poetry, Love Minus Love, is an internal universe, fragmented and glued back together with uncanny logic. A strange layering of time, in which multiple things happen at once, in a looping track of intrusive thoughts - shot through with dead cows, pop songs, dead dads, the white noise of televisions - rotten teeth are raining everywhere. Somewhere at the core of all this, the seemingly fixed boundaries of masculinity, family, trauma and mental health are blurred towards a new type of vinegary identity, in a pitch of emotional intensity that punches you right in the gut.
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I could be a free grateful guilt.
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(@BloodaxeBooks, 3 September 2020, ebook, 80 pages, #ARC from publisher via @edelweiss_squad)
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These poems were enjoyable and well written for the most part. Love minus Love deals with familiar and common themes including family, emotional trauma and mental health. The poems don't have a title. This is something that really bugs me. A poem title helps to ground me in the moment and make better sense of the message the poet is trying to convey. Without titles, the collection meandered and wondered and didn't fit very well together. Also, there was a major formatting issue with the book; all of the poems ran together which made it very difficult to work out where one poem ended and one started. In some cases the words all ran together making some poems hard to read. These issues aside, the poems were enjoyable but nothing that hasn't been done before.
