First Winter in Iceland by Luke Allan
For February’s Poem of the Month, I have chosen to write about Luke Allan’s poem First Winter in Iceland, published by The White Review. It is a quiet poem, one that meditates on small moments, observations that might seem insignificant, but which hold a kind of power within the poem. I like Allan’s use of simple and straightforward language in a way that is illuminating; we learn a great deal from what is implied. It is a love poem, but one that is not obviously so, small details that link together to create the full image of the love he feels for his wife.
It begins with an awakening. The sound of sneezing from a neighbour. The walls must be so thin. A glass of water on the side which is beautifully described as “night-dulled”, and the pizza in an open box in the car park which is “sleeping”, exactly the opposite of what the narrator is doing. I like the personification of the pizza in a box like it is a bed and the way it shimmers with “slices of rain” as though it is sweating or feverish. The narrator notices the graffiti on the bakery wall, draws our attention to it. Sprayed painted on the wall is the name of his stepfather who we understand to be dead. A moment of pause in which we perhaps reflect on someone we have lost in our own lives, the strangeness of seeing their name out in the world, amplifying their absence.
Up until this point, the poem has been very exterior; the narrator looks out at things from the window, observing the world from a distance as though he is separate from it. And in this way, the poem is arranged in two halves, despite there only being one stanza, no space for a break. I like the way Allan moves very suddenly from wide panoramic shot to extreme close-up: “the rim of this glass tastes of both our mouths.” Such an intimate detail. It is the only part in the poem that contains a whole sentence on a single line. The narrator lingers in this line. There is something erotic in the sensory-ness of it, the rim of the glass acting as a vehicle in which they kiss, lips pressed to the taste of lips. It is in itself an act of love, to be so aware of the other person, so attuned to the way they feel, the taste of them, the smell.
And then again, a turn. A zooming out. A build-up of emotion. The narrator sings in the shower while his wife sometimes brushes her teeth. This simple act of living, of the mundane everyday, has a powerful effect on the narrator; he “feel[s] love”, just by watching his wife brush her teeth. And this in turn makes us view the scene through tinted glasses, the narrator is forcing us to be present in this moment of joy through use of repetition: “you come in to brush your teeth, and I feel / love. A woman is brushing her teeth and / is my wife, I think.” Allan’s use of “I think” at the end of this sentence illustrates how disbelieving love can be. You are in complete amazement that this person is standing in front of you, so dumbfounded that you can call them your wife. And this feeling is articulated in the next sentence: “Because sometimes it is hard / to say out loud the thing you absolutely feel.” Something that rings completely true. It is not always easy to articulate into words such strong emotions, not easy to find a language for them.
The poem ends on a final observation. We are back looking out of the window, having left the interiority of their domestic life: “…two ambulances pass each other / heading opposite ways, and the morning is lost.” And that is that. We slip back into the mundane, leaving behind that one shining, glittering moment. The poem seems to perfectly capture the way in which we can suddenly, for a brief second, be struck by light, the whole world luminous and illuminating. And then it is just as suddenly gone, and we fall back into the grey monotony, back into the everyday.
You can read the full poem and listen to Luke Allan reading it here.
Text and illustration by Rochelle Roberts
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