When you think of love as an organ, you think of the heart. But the journey of attraction usually starts at the intersection of eyes—before a malfunctioning traffic light—flashing emotions. A gaze into the eyes is a probe into the soul. In Mellexy Through Your Eyes, Lanre Sonde holds a steady lens on themes of beauty, longing, intimacy and dreams. The thirty-one poems in this collection are short and lyrical, the diction, suggestive and sensual, soft on the mind.

Light is the language of the eyes. We can argue that the personas in most of the verses in this book are in perpetual darkness, desperate for love—blind, seeking the beauty of vision. Here, love is depicted as a meld of imagination and reality. There is a sustained interplay of fantastic and concrete images of affection through the eighty-five pages of the book.

The opening poem enters with a vulnerability reminiscent of a typical love experience. The poet consistently contrasts beauty and devastation. I perished in the beauty of your eyes presents such a gripping paradox that makes you snap your seatbelt on, and hold tight on to the grab handle. A few more poems open with similar compel and urgency as A Tale in Your Eyes: My circuit burnt (For My Eyes Only, page 12), Charge to my rescue (You Are a Feeling, page 45). But the poet knows how to spike a poem with some good dose of love weed, and give the readers mental wings. Affection in this book is almost juvenile, joyful, without blemish or consequence.

When I’m with you
I fall to pieces
Like colourful confetti rain ('My Crest,' page 54)

The writer, from having picnics in the sky in, “In the Awe of You” (page 60), to chandeliers raining flowers in a dance room, in “Oceans in your Eyes” (page 76), takes us on a wild trip through spiral stairways to a happy place.

This collection can easily be referred to as the poetry of “human eyes”. The “eyes”, mentioned over two hundred times across the poems and commentaries, adopts a range of symbols: stars, treasure, oceans, fire, hills, wind, flowers, sun rays. It’s mixed signals. You would expect a bit more creative exploration of this body part with some reference to its anatomical structure, attributes, and functional specificity. On the other hand, the metaphors genuflect before your critical altar, appealing for an appreciation of the figurative.

Sometimes the imagery is predictable, like, Your eyes are like fire/purify me in your flames, from “Something About your Eyes”. At other times, you happen upon sharp metaphors at the mouth of a bend. In the same poem, you encounter this subtle exoticism: Your eyes are like the hills/Show me your secrets. There’s a similar attempt at mystery in “In Your Hues” that leaves you pondering a paradox:

You are my irreplaceable sun
I see your shadow(s) in my room

The heavy reliance on figurative metaphors and visual imagery amplifies the paucity of other poetic elements such as tone and narrative depth. There’s a glut of abstract images and idyllic plots that screams a lack of empirical engagement. While a book begs thematic unity, individual pieces need to be daring, avoiding recurring imagery and monotonous narratives. Star is mentioned fourteen times, and beauty, fifteen times—love is mentioned a whopping one hundred and fifty-nine times and light appears twenty-nine times in the book.

The average human seeks completeness in a lover. And this is the ultimate confession of the poet personas in these verses.

You fix my broken glass
My world is whole again
You complete me ('The Glow in Your Eyes', pg 9)

All I ever needed in life
I found it in you
You fix my broken glass ('Candy Rain,' pg 64)

Love interests are seen as answers to prayers, fulcrums—the pieces that hold the centre together. Emotions largely cloud logic. And when expectations are not tamed, disappointment is inevitable. Lanre Sonde was able to successfully establish the feeling of romantic attraction as a super power, or how do you explain stares and gazes that heal and hold spellbound? The poet tries to show us how much communication can be done without words—how much data is locked in our natural optical devices.

In “Fill Me In”, the persona asks to be let in on the lover’s dreams—you don’t have to say a word/show me through your eyes. Similarly in My Wild, the persona reiterates, you don’t have to say a word/just smile/And/I’m yours forever. The height of illusion and naivety of the speaker, who seems satisfied with the slightest show of acceptance, even when there’s an apparent absence of verbal confirmation! This could well be a long one-way traffic of fondness and infatuation—a timid character, paralysed by beauty, continually tongue-tied. When I’m with you/I try to keep my composure/Listening to what your eyes say

From the title, one could mistake the book for a love letter to Mellexy. The cover image would also stoke that thought. As a practice, I avoid reading introductory texts when reviewing a book. I love to go in blind, with all my assumptions—at least for my first read. It helps perspectives. Mellexy, coined from “mellow” and “sexy”, is a subgenre of poetry created by the author. But beyond the length and nature of the poems, though, there isn’t an identity of form or structure that distinguishes these short sensual pieces from any other free verse poem.

My favourite poem in the collection is Peaches, a two-in-one poem, that is a poetry tutorial on how thoughts can be condensed, given immediacy. The poem has certain words in bold fonts and, read alone, forms a different poem. The original version of the poem is expressive, leaning on imagery. The shorter version is lyrical—the author referred to it as a message in a bottle—and this is apt, because the metaphors are personal, esoteric, and like a dream.

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Jide Badmus is a poet, literary promoter, and electrical engineer by training. He is the author of five poetry books, including the SEVHAGE published book, Scriptures (2018) (and several chapbooks). Also the Poetry Editor of Con-scio Magazine, Jide is a noted literary promoter and reviewer. He can be reached via his website http://jidebadmus.com