Life Without Air

Daisy Lafarge
Granta

Taking its title from Louis Pasteur’s description of fermentation as la vie sans l’air, Lafarge’s first full-length collection offers a timely exploration of being and breathlessness.

Poems take our breath away by multiplying and intensifying meaning—playing sound and sense off against one another in such a way as to render what might have been a singular, prosaic piece of language much more richly ambiguous. Lafarge does this beautifully in the short, italicised piece which opens the book, playing a subtle series of variations on the letters of the word ‘meridian’:

Meridian
I dream in
I rid name
I mend air

Reading these lines, I had a sense of a number of poetic roles being entertained: the poet as dreamer, as un-namer, mender and healer, makar and un-makar.

Air as element and absence is, clearly, a major theme of this collection. However, it strikes me that the ferment Pasteur describes is equally important as an organising principle, with lyric fermentation being a helpful way to think about how Lafarge’s poems work. In the title sequence, she writes ‘Empedocles was a woman / in a sex of natural disasters’, re-gendering the Ancient Greek originator of the four elements. The sequence ends by stating ‘that to be in your element is to die in it’. Lafarge’s poems voice a desire to step outside that element, enduring in a metaphorical, rather than chemical, ferment.

To ferment is, perhaps, to not stay still; to not accept the limitations to which we are or might be subjected. Certainly, many of the poems in this book kick against confinement and contingency, as in ‘How to Leave a Marriage’: ‘Romance is the hole we’re tripped into filling. / Love is the name we gave it.’ Elsewhere, her focus is ecological, addressing the toxic results of our unsustainable relationships with our environment, as opposed to one another. ‘Dredging the Baotou Lake’, an eight-part sequence whose title refers to ‘a poisonous manmade lake outside Baotou, the largest industrial city in Inner Mongolia’, begins:

my love for you outstretches all the pipework of CERN
is a thing no one has ever said, most likely

The contradiction—no one has ever said this, but I just did—echoes Lafarge’s sustaining theme of life without air, poetry when there’s no air to breathe (as may literally come to pass if we fail to address the threat brewing in the Baotou Lake). It’s an apparent impossibility which makes for exhilarating reading and a compelling collection.

—Stewart Sanderson