single window

Daniel Sluman’s single window contains poems of extraordinary intensity and, viewed by the light of a single window, this is a collection which, above all, teaches us about love, writes John Field

single window is accompanied by photographs shot by Sluman and his wife, Emily Brenchi-Sluman. As the collection marks the passing of the seasons, it explores both the limits of the couple’s world, and the day-to-day challenges of managing pain and caring for one another. The result is poetry of extraordinary intensity and, viewed by the light of a single window, this is a collection which, above all, teaches us about love.

Brokenness is apparent immediately: Sluman works in free verse and stabs of language lie scattered over the opening pages of ‘autumn’. The margins of the domestic sphere are redrawn and the sofa, typically a space for evenings and weekends, becomes ‘the sofa we’ve lived in / for the last eight months’. The couple are pinned by pain as ‘fatigue stirs through our bones / anchors us into the stained sheets’. It’s a leaden image and, as the flukes of an anchor bury themselves in the muck on the seabed to hold the vessel in place, so the speaker and his partner are buried in domestic alluvium. The vessel’s anchor holds it fast, defying the otherwise implacable tidal forces that move the water around it – and so Sluman’s speaker and his partner remain, surrounded by a frowzy autumnal decay, ‘slick with rotting leaves’.

One might hope that a window would offer a change of scene, a breath of fresh air, but the sense of suffocation Sluman creates is unrelenting. In order to see the weather, instead of looking outside, ‘you log onto your phone / to see how near the clouds are closing’ – and the ‘closing’ clouds only serve to confine the couple a third time, like a tiny matryoshka doll in a series of enclosures: couch, house and clouds. The only heavens here are viewed through the lens of analgesics, and the only time here is measured in the moments until the next dose is permitted: ‘we count down the seconds / before the pills sing their gospel inside us // we rock in our seats / eyes rolled back // towards the heaven / of improved conditions’.

Light does penetrate the neutral tones of Sluman’s single window. At one moment in ‘spring’, he works with lines comprising single words: a beam of light ‘poured / through / like / cans / of / paint / flooding / the / tiny / aperture’. The joy and colour is overwhelming and ‘flooding’ offers both an image of cleansing and renewal, but is also an act of erasure. Later in the poem, Sluman presents ‘full- / throated / reds’ in a nod to Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, a poem flirting with oblivion, and attracted to the dull opiates of Lethe.

‘summer’ brings intimacy and the ‘electrical cord snaking between your thighs’ presents one form of this but, without missing a beat, Sluman segues into the intimacy of care, where each nurses the other, where the speaker nurses his partner ‘with a patience / [he] could never summon for anyone else’. ‘summer’ presents us with a rare glimpse of the outside world and, as the collection closes, we see ‘commuters shouldering / past each other / eyes fixed / on the smouldering sidewalk’. The heat of this image, together with those eyes, fixed to the ground is something straight out of Canto III of Dante’s Inferno, or from Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ and this dog-eat-dog world looks even more horrifying than usual when compared with the unconditional love and vulnerability Sluman presents in his indoors world.

single window is a work of clarity and intensity, and the photographs contributed by Emily Brenchi-Sluman add to its collaborative quality. The collection celebrates human dignity and, above all, reminds us that love is the drug – that love is enough.

Daniel Sluman’s single window (Nine Arches Press) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.