Sweat Dreams, the Sea
by Luke Allan
(Poetry Society of America, 2025)
I
Snow
Sweet Dreams, the Sea is an elegiac tract underscored in snow. Comprising a slight collation of sixteen poems, this contemporary winterreise is an Icelandic cartography of loss outworked with both exactitude and lightness of touch. Scale is deformed by snow in this suite, as is pathetic fallacy: ‘It’s why I say snow to refer to/ what is snowing in me’ Allan confides, whose interior weather systems are implicitly emotional. This is a language of tracery, tactility and track whose main motifs embody contradiction. Allan deploys a crucial simplicity to draw the normalcy and gratuitousness of grief into a snow-blind landscape of the heart. When figures emerge, they are subject to the laws of snow: sensorily blurred, numbed, dulled. Distance and temporality are warped, as in ‘So Heavy You Can Hear It’ where Allan observes:
‘It wasn’t unusual to see a person walking backwards
through the snow to their home / future / surprise.
If that wasn’t heaven, nothing was.
The surreality this engenders enables the absurdism of snow to operate within the confines of the book as a metaphor for both helplessness and transcendence. Allen’s sense of suspension, sometimes observational, sometimes luminous, haunts the pages with the instincts of a Metaphysical poet. Images become oppressed, phantasmic; the snow, nullifying and oppressive, as Allan shifts his focus: ‘the stub of wax/ in the candlestick, where time went.’ Yet snow in Allan’s hands is not merely an abstraction, it is a manifestation –– an eliciting or soliciting of mood with arresting precision. True to form, his images move in proliferation, mimicking the first photographic depiction of individual snowflakes for a moment crystallised in unique beauty only to melt against the bewildering backdrop of snow as landscape, or as soundscape: a weather in which sound travels differently as his images form and dissolve in this trudging endurance of the grief-stricken heart:
‘I said, it hurts the most in bed at night.
I said, we could have helped you.
She laughed and said the wind is a beautiful crystal
spread infinitely thin, and eventually
the snow kept falling.’
II
Dreams/Ghosts/Dream
And, slowly, a self-haunting occurs in these pages. Perceptually rooted in snow, the poet seemingly undergoes a dissolution of the self and (m)other. Allan is not entirely entrenched in his own visceral being and treads lightly in this: ‘I can touch your eyelid/ with my nose and that too is part of the twenty-first century’ he hazards when addressing the living woman in the book: his much-loved wife, the poet Vala Thorodds. Holographic body languages, the heightened awarenesses of aftermath absorb and guide Allan through articulating the consequences of death when: ‘Once my mum went into her bedroom/ and took her own life.’ This is a frank transliteration, where Allan rewrites his own handbook to living and dying with perspicacity and humour:
‘Had a fight in the street with my mother’s ghost
because all she ever does is walk through me.’
Small acts abound, small observations, where the saline meets the snow: nihilism dissolving in weathered tears –– ‘Today I had my annual cry, splashed about/ like a boy with new wellingtons.’ And everyday spectres manifest: ‘the onions are getting thin/ as ghosts in their bed of oil.’ And frustration too, occurs: ‘At the petrol station my hand fell off, more or less,/
feeding the car some combination of petrol and snow.’
By recurring dream, or ghost or thought, Allan builds his place of encounter again experiencing the inner chamber, the Elizabethan ghost-soil of the heart:
‘This time I’m allowed to be there with her.
She’s finished sealing the door with tape
and is arranging the disposable grills
at the foot of the bed. The air in the room
is see-through in a way that makes me realize
normal air isn’t. The last grill won’t light
and she’s angry that she can’t do even this.
I place my chin in the little chin nest
on the top of her head. [. . .]
I hold her hand when the coughing starts.’
III
Sea
Now the sea haunts the snow-globe as Allen shakes his world, both macrocosmic and microcosmic, disturbing the binaries between life and death during the ‘long Icelandic snow nights [. . .] The lights all out, quiet as the inside of a shoe.’ Snow meeting the sea’s surface might be a place in which tears occur:
‘I like that feeling of almost not reaching the sea
but turning back from turning back
and continuing outwards anyway despite
the emptiness.’
This ruminative quietude accompanies Allan on his way through the book, in a place where grief refreshes itself through intimate words and actions: ‘I raise the blinds/ and drink the night-dulled water’, ‘I am learning to say took her own life‘. In an act of increasing generosity, the reader too is subject to the tidal experience of Sweet Dreams, the Sea –– is able to confront their own sorrow, to join Allan and Thorodds as they sit in the ‘warm darkness of the car/ with the radio on, watching the snow coming at us/ over the water, [. . .] The mouthfeel of car headlights against the sea.’