Friends, thanks very much for listening to Poetry and Bound. The Poetry and Bound book is out in loads of places around the world and it's almost out in the US on December the 6th that will be launched in the US.

And they'll make a great holiday gift if you want to buy one or more than one. You can pre-order a copy of the book at Poetry and Bound.org.

And if you're listening before the launch date, you can join us for an online launch in the evening of December the 6th. It's all free and you can register for that too at Poetry and Bound.org.

I look forward to meeting you on the page or meeting you at the launch.

My name is Podrigotuma and in my 20s I lived in Australia for four years. And obviously Winter in Ireland is summer in Australia.

And I could never get used to the way that people would say, oh, it was a boiling hot December day.

Part of my mind all was thought, we're joking, that's not true at all.

I, over the four years, continue to find myself feeling like I've been turned upside down. And I never entirely could get used to the fact that seasons and temperature and the imagination of what weather to associate with what month was so different to everything that I was so used to.

Norse saga by Dan Vera.

Let us praise the immigrant who leaves the tropics and arrives in Chicago in the dead of winter.

Let us praise the immigrant who has never worn coats who was bundled up against an unimaginable cold.

For they were right letters home that speak of it like Norse sagas with claims that if a frigid hell exists the entrance is hidden somewhere in this city.

Let us praise the immigrant who fears the depths of the subway, the disappearance of landmarks to guide them through the labyrinth.

Let us praise the immigrant who dreams of the pleasures of sunstroke, who wakes each morning to the alien sight of their breath suspended in the cold city air.

This poem has a phrase that's repeated four times. Let us praise the immigrant.

Who is the us in that? Who is speaking? We don't know yet. Somehow it's somebody who knows what's going on, who can observe, who can see everything that's happening in the life of the immigrant and is giving great adulation to everything that the immigrant is doing.

What we can see is that they leave the tropics. They've arrived in Chicago in winter, the dead of winter, it says. And they hadn't worn a coat or hadn't needed to at home.

This is an immigrant who, or these are immigrants, who write home, describing the weather in mythological terms and whose imagination of hell perhaps moves from being a hell of fire and brimstone into a hell of fragility and icicles and cold.

This is an immigrant for whom navigation of a city is a strange one and for whom cold breath and the air is new. This is who's being praised four times. In the middle of all of these experiences of strangeness, somebody is honoring and speaking a voice of comfort, I suppose, a voice of celebration to somebody for whom everything seems new.

So there's references to mythology everywhere throughout this poem. The title, first of all, Nor saga. And then the journey that's praised so many mythologies are about the journey, you know, the person leaves or the stranger arrives.

And then these people who've arrived see things in a new place that are strange to them and the story is written here in letters that are being sent back home.

Somehow there's a connection with the old country and you find that in lots of mythologies. Somebody goes away and comes back and the story is communicated.

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