‘Love Poem’ by Madeleine Witt is a poetry comic published in Ink Brick issue 10. The work extends over two pages, each with a square image further divided into four square panels. In this way, it follows a standard comics grid layout, giving the reader a suggestion of the sequence in which the text and images should be read.
Visually, the style of the comic consists of pastel colours and soft edges, giving an overall soothing tone through the colour palette, which reflects the majority of the language used in the text. The comic’s title, ‘Love Poem’, cues us to read the text as a speaker addressing a lover, which loads the poem’s opening lines – ‘So then | where will we live?’ – with a suggestion of planning for the future together. The comics continues sequentially with very comforting and idyllic imagery, both visual and in language.
This sense of romance, however, is undercut with other, more ominous language and images in the second page. Here, we see a dramatic poetic volta take place, as the first panel of the second page shows a burning forest and the line ‘Even though the sun keeps getting larger outside the window’, both of which create a sense of looming danger that threatens the idyll of the scene.
By the end of the comic, the combination of text and image results in a sense of reconciling the urge to enjoy the here and now with the knowledge of larger external negative forces. In this piece, the burning forest and looming red sun are highly suggestive of the climate crisis, and the poem seems to be expressing the dilemma of how to live and enjoy life when faced with such existential threat. Small comforts are shown as a means of coping with such dread, even if only momentarily. In its final line and image, the comic acknowledges that these larger concerns must still be addressed, however, and that ‘work will come | with the morning.’
The comic uses several visual devices to further express this sense of a threatened self-contained moment and, at a larger scale, a threatened world. The four panels of each page are composed to create a circle from their inner corners, but in both cases the circle is broken by one or two of the panels. The use also of the window frame as a visual motif in three of the panels draw attention to the distinction between the private world of the lovers and the encroaching danger from outside.