Lobsters

Our approach to Wayne Holloway-Smith’s brilliant poetic pathos is blanched, fleshy and teeming with poignant decay

Book
A render of the front cover of the book ‘Lobsters’ by Wayne Holloway-Smith. The background colour is a sickly, lobster-pink, and the text is black, in a bold, condensed serif font. Above the book's title is a graphical illustration of a fork, lying on its side, and below is a knife. In the bottom left-corner, the top-right portion of a dinner plate can be seen, the edge of which is encircled by a repeating pattern consisting of the following motifs: an open lipstick, a treble clef, a cigarette, four buttons. In the top right is the Makina Poetry logo, the words sitting within two interlinked circles.
A render of the back cover of the book ‘Lobsters’ by Wayne Holloway-Smith. The background colour is a sickly, lobster-pink, and the text is black. Two review excerpts sit in the centre of the page. In the bottom right-corner, the top-left portion of a dinner plate can be seen, the edge of which is encircled by a repeating pattern consisting of the following motifs: an open lipstick, a treble clef, a cigarette, four buttons.

Under the rug

Lobsters is Wayne Holloway Smith turning his innovative poetics towards an exhilarating new work that is part songbook, part elastic melodrama.

The design delves into a variety of themes within Lobsters, including the municipal and domestic monotony concealed beneath the emotion of a relationship ending—a part homage to the constituent parts of kitchen sink dramas—alongside the notion of the dusty carpet of a soon-to-be vacated flat revealing objects rediscovered under now-removed furniture, forming poignant reminders of a period of one’s life in the process of fading to a memory.

The cover soils the opulent perceptions of a meal of lobster (and the pink tones of its flesh) via the shadows within the creases and edges of its pages, which also represent the secrets of those domestic spaces and the darkness, dust and dirt that remains when we leave them. The ‘fold’ at the top left of the cover suggests (culinarily) a corner of a tablecloth or napkin overturned and (domestically) a strip of peeling wallpaper.

The accompanying plate that bisects the cover is decorated with ephemeral objects mentioned within the work (buttons, a lipstick, a cigarette) alongside a treble clef. The latter speaks to the previous concept of a melodrama via a sardonic or ironic lens, and twins with the staves that form much of the interior—a wonderful original idea that Robin from Makina brought to the design smorgasbord!

Buy 'Lobsters'
The inside cover spread from the book ‘Lobsters’ by Wayne Holloway-Smith. The left-hand page is made up of a repeated pattern of overlapping button motifs, light-pink on a darker pink background and is mostly obscured by the light pink-coloured flap of the book's front cover, which contains a paragraph of text as well us some more button motifs, seemingly spilling over from the other side. The right-hand page contains two musical staves at both the top and bottom, in between which is a graphical illustration of a dinner plate placed in between a knife and form. The plate's edge is encircled by a repeating pattern consisting of the following motifs: an open lipstick, a treble clef, a cigarette, four buttons.
An interior spread from the book ‘Lobsters’ by Wayne Holloway-Smith. The left-hand page is a series of musical staves, in between which are the following lines: '[Singing], I miss, everything, about, my life.' The poem continues on the opposite page.
An interior spread from the book ‘Lobsters’ by Wayne Holloway-Smith. Lines of text run across the centres of both pages.
A composite render of the book ‘Lobsters’ by Wayne Holloway-Smith with an accompanying rectangular print and large circular sticker on the same sickly pink background. The sticker also displays some of the same motifs as the book—the sticker itself is the plate upon which the faint outlines of a knife and fork rest. The print is dark black with a white inset double border and white text. Musical staves running the length of the print become more and more visible towards the bottom of the lines, and in between the staves read 'to talk about the original hunger, was impossible, I ate, all this love, I ate, I ate libraries, tears, I ate, a door'.