Between Atmosphere and Airlessness:
Daisy Lafarge’s ‘Life without Air’
Rochelle Roberts

In both Daisy Lafarge’s poetry and prose -see her ‘Metaphor as Parasite’ in our Hollow issue – consciousness seems to float seamlessly in a fermentation of biology and minerology. Rochelle Roberts reviews her latest poetry collection here and finds it ‘full of, and without air’.

Daisy Lafarge’s Life Without Air treads the line between atmosphere and airlessness; it is a collection that is both full of, and without, air. The title comes from the French scientist Louis Pasteur who, while observing the process of fermentation, noticed that while most organisms could not survive a lack of oxygen, some were able to thrive and thus live without air.

In ‘what Genie got’, Genie becomes “adept at the opposite of breathing”. It is a strange and surreal poem, one that is visually vivid. The opening begins with Genie waking up one morning to find her mother has transformed into a trumpet and fused herself to the notch above Genie’s sternum. This alarming scene is told unflinchingly in a way that is reminiscent of Gregor waking up to find he is a cockroach in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

The poem fills with juxtaposing textures of air-ness and airlessness, building up a multi-layered timbre. Genie becomes silent to give way to the orchestra of her mother. At the end of the first stanza, “Genie [holds] her breath” while the plaster from her ceiling rains down on her, caused by her mother’s yells, which make cracks in the walls. This initial outburst results from Genie breathing. In this way, Lafarge fashions a bizarre scene in which Genie’s act of breathing, causes destruction through the vehicle of her mother; Genie breathes and the world of her bedroom crumbles.

In the second stanza, in order to counteract this, Genie stops breathing. But her mother, mutates from a trumpet into a whole orchestra, and in Genie’s silence her mother’s “gangs of woodwind […] heckle from buildings”, while “an untuned celesta […] shatter[s] her tray of champagne flutes”. It is an unsettling existence that culminates in the solitude of Genie after she tries to kiss a girl behind a locker at school. The locker fills up with cymbals and their timbre unravel the girl, Serina. She steps away from Genie. The air is described as “sweetly staling”, a sickening lack of reciprocation. Genie is left lustfully walking the corridors alone.

It is tempting to read a kind of ecological metaphor into the poem. Much of the collection is concerned with the non-human, with ecology and infectious disease, mould and biology. We are also living through Coronavirus, becoming hyperaware of the things we cannot see that infect our bodies, making it difficult to breathe. In this way, Genie’s mother appears as a virus – attaching to Genie’s body. She must adapt the way she can live with it, to not breathe in order to eliminate its symptoms. But it mutates and becomes something out of her control, something that wreaks havoc on her life.

But there are other more obvious allusions. The poem ends with a line adapted from 1 Kings 17:6 “And the ravens brought [her] bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening, and [s]he drank of the brook.” It refers to a part in the bible where God commands Elijah to “turn […] eastward, and hide […] by the brook Cherith”. Elijah is left in solitude with nothing but the ravens to feed him and the brook to give him water. This solitariness echoes the end of the poem where Genie is walking the corridors of her school alone. All of the things she sees offer themselves up as “half-bleached sacraments” which Genie accepts as though she is unburdening herself, giving herself over to a god-like power. In this way she echoes Elijah, who did as god wished and concealed himself into a period of isolation.

In a collection entitled Life Without Air, it is interesting to see the close attention Lafarge pays to describing the air in many of her poems. In ‘what Genie got’ the air is “sweetly staling” and “reverberant” whereas in ‘The pipework of CERN’ it is “stale”. In other poems, the air is personified, as in ‘attempted diagnosis air’ which begins “your designs to fabricate an alarm / to apprehend the air / went through several prototypes”, and in ‘aggregate air’ where “city skins / grow thick with corporate / heraldry, scabbing the air / tight to wound.” The air is given a kind of life within the poems, taking on its own characteristics, reflecting the atmosphere of the poem or characters within it. This gives the book as sense of airiness, its shifting manifestations.

Throughout the collection, Lafarge makes reference to various philosophers, scientist and religious figures, weaving together poems informed by ideas and theories in religion, biology and ecological science. But part of the strength of the collection is that as a reader, you do not need a specialist knowledge of these areas of study in order to understand and appreciate the poems. Lafarge’s use of specialist lexis side-by-side with language of the everyday give her poems a grounding in contemporary life, bringing them vividly alive. This is evident in a poem like ‘How to leave a marriage’ which shifts seamlessly between registers, the scientific and the ordinary. Within the poem are contained phrases such as “four-hour video / of sea turtles on YouTube” and “I composed / many emails, and emails arrived from friends / like soft rain.” alongside “I was trying / to remember the stages of putrefaction.” and “The insects were all flying west, away from the sputum / they flung from.”

In ‘Performing the border’, the third poem of a sequence called ‘Dredging the Baotou Lake’, exploring the toxicity and paradox of The Baotou Lake – a poisonous manmade lake in Mongolia, formed of by-products of rare-earth mineral mining which provides materials needed for smartphones and televisions as well as green technologies such as wind turbines – Lafarge imbues metaphor and emotion with the language of science to centre the collection within a framework of the natural world, emphasising the concerns and interests explored in many of the poems, with phrases such as “the ecology / between emotions and handheld / devices”. She uses language similarly, for example, in ‘infrastructure air’ from the sequence ‘understudies for air’, in which she writes “its fingers pollinate, / cleave down the gullet and throng / the dark thickets of lung.” and also in ‘mineral intimacy’ which begins “unabashedly love / the minerals of you”.

Although the collection is deeply rooted in explorations of the non-human, it is also very much concerned with human emotion and intimacy, both loving and toxic. Lafarge’s poems are full of relationships between people, and it is these relationships, the way characters interact or the things they say or think, that make the poems resonate. In ‘mineral intimacy’ Lafarge explores love through metaphor. But there is also a kind of violence contained within it, one that presents itself in a way that is romanticised, or at least the violence of it is not harmful:

        … when I lookèd away my
        lashes wer caught in yr layers & tore clean off like the stripping of bark /
        Now prt of me’s filed in yr endless strata & the wind combs hotly my nkd eyes

There is something parasitic about the way the speaker becomes forever part of the other person, similar to how the mother attaches herself to Genie in ‘what Genie got’.

Conversely, in a poem like ‘Fossil Dinner’, we witness the patriarchal relationship between a husband and wife through the event of a dinner party, in which the role of the wife is to “mind the cloth and not to speak.” And in ‘A Question for Zeno’ the speaker reveals, through a series of letters to Zeno of Elea, that she recently left a coercive relationship in which she gave her entire savings to her abusive ex. The underpinnings of the male as potentially threatening can be found elsewhere in more subtly ways too, such as in ‘How to leave a marriage’ in which the speaker says:

        I thought if I talked to him long enough

        maybe I would too, though I was wary of men and hoped

Daisy Lafarge’s Life Without Air treads the line between atmosphere and airlessness; it is a collection that is both full of, and without, air. The title comes from the French scientist Louis Pasteur who, while observing the process of fermentation, noticed that while most organisms could not survive a lack of oxygen, some were able to thrive and thus live without air.

In ‘what Genie got’, Genie becomes “adept at the opposite of breathing”. It is a strange and surreal poem, one that is visually vivid. The opening begins with Genie waking up one morning to find her mother has transformed into a trumpet and fused herself to the notch above Genie’s sternum. This alarming scene is told unflinchingly in a way that is reminiscent of Gregor waking up to find he is a cockroach in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

The poem fills with juxtaposing textures of air-ness and airlessness, building up a multi-layered timbre. Genie becomes silent to give way to the orchestra of her mother. At the end of the first stanza, “Genie [holds] her breath” while the plaster from her ceiling rains down on her, caused by her mother’s yells, which make cracks in the walls. This initial outburst results from Genie breathing. In this way, Lafarge fashions a bizarre scene in which Genie’s act of breathing, causes destruction through the vehicle of her mother; Genie breathes and the world of her bedroom crumbles.

In the second stanza, in order to counteract this, Genie stops breathing. But her mother, mutates from a trumpet into a whole orchestra, and in Genie’s silence her mother’s “gangs of woodwind […] heckle from buildings”, while “an untuned celesta […] shatter[s] her tray of champagne flutes”. It is an unsettling existence that culminates in the solitude of Genie after she tries to kiss a girl behind a locker at school. The locker fills up with cymbals and their timbre unravel the girl, Serina. She steps away from Genie. The air is described as “sweetly staling”, a sickening lack of reciprocation. Genie is left lustfully walking the corridors alone.

It is tempting to read a kind of ecological metaphor into the poem. Much of the collection is concerned with the non-human, with ecology and infectious disease, mould and biology. We are also living through Coronavirus, becoming hyperaware of the things we cannot see that infect our bodies, making it difficult to breathe. In this way, Genie’s mother appears as a virus – attaching to Genie’s body. She must adapt the way she can live with it, to not breathe in order to eliminate its symptoms. But it mutates and becomes something out of her control, something that wreaks havoc on her life.

But there are other more obvious allusions. The poem ends with a line adapted from 1 Kings 17:6 “And the ravens brought [her] bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening, and [s]he drank of the brook.” It refers to a part in the bible where God commands Elijah to “turn […] eastward, and hide […] by the brook Cherith”. Elijah is left in solitude with nothing but the ravens to feed him and the brook to give him water. This solitariness echoes the end of the poem where Genie is walking the corridors of her school alone. All of the things she sees offer themselves up as “half-bleached sacraments” which Genie accepts as though she is unburdening herself, giving herself over to a god-like power. In this way she echoes Elijah, who did as god wished and concealed himself into a period of isolation.

In a collection entitled Life Without Air, it is interesting to see the close attention Lafarge pays to describing the air in many of her poems. In ‘what Genie got’ the air is “sweetly staling” and “reverberant” whereas in ‘The pipework of CERN’ it is “stale”. In other poems, the air is personified, as in ‘attempted diagnosis air’ which begins “your designs to fabricate an alarm / to apprehend the air / went through several prototypes”, and in ‘aggregate air’ where “city skins / grow thick with corporate / heraldry, scabbing the air / tight to wound.” The air is given a kind of life within the poems, taking on its own characteristics, reflecting the atmosphere of the poem or characters within it. This gives the book as sense of airiness, its shifting manifestations.

Throughout the collection, Lafarge makes reference to various philosophers, scientist and religious figures, weaving together poems informed by ideas and theories in religion, biology and ecological science. But part of the strength of the collection is that as a reader, you do not need a specialist knowledge of these areas of study in order to understand and appreciate the poems. Lafarge’s use of specialist lexis side-by-side with language of the everyday give her poems a grounding in contemporary life, bringing them vividly alive. This is evident in a poem like ‘How to leave a marriage’ which shifts seamlessly between registers, the scientific and the ordinary. Within the poem are contained phrases such as “four-hour video / of sea turtles on YouTube” and “I composed / many emails, and emails arrived from friends / like soft rain.” alongside “I was trying / to remember the stages of putrefaction.” and “The insects were all flying west, away from the sputum / they flung from.”

In ‘Performing the border’, the third poem of a sequence called ‘Dredging the Baotou Lake’, exploring the toxicity and paradox of The Baotou Lake – a poisonous manmade lake in Mongolia, formed of by-products of rare-earth mineral mining which provides materials needed for smartphones and televisions as well as green technologies such as wind turbines – Lafarge imbues metaphor and emotion with the language of science to centre the collection within a framework of the natural world, emphasising the concerns and interests explored in many of the poems, with phrases such as “the ecology / between emotions and handheld / devices”. She uses language similarly, for example, in ‘infrastructure air’ from the sequence ‘understudies for air’, in which she writes “its fingers pollinate, / cleave down the gullet and throng / the dark thickets of lung.” and also in ‘mineral intimacy’ which begins “unabashedly love / the minerals of you”.

Although the collection is deeply rooted in explorations of the non-human, it is also very much concerned with human emotion and intimacy, both loving and toxic. Lafarge’s poems are full of relationships between people, and it is these relationships, the way characters interact or the things they say or think, that make the poems resonate. In ‘mineral intimacy’ Lafarge explores love through metaphor. But there is also a kind of violence contained within it, one that presents itself in a way that is romanticised, or at least the violence of it is not harmful:

        … when I lookèd away my
        lashes wer caught in yr layers & tore clean off like the stripping of bark /
        Now prt of me’s filed in yr endless strata & the wind combs hotly my nkd eyes

There is something parasitic about the way the speaker becomes forever part of the other person, similar to how the mother attaches herself to Genie in ‘what Genie got’.

Conversely, in a poem like ‘Fossil Dinner’, we witness the patriarchal relationship between a husband and wife through the event of a dinner party, in which the role of the wife is to “mind the cloth and not to speak.” And in ‘A Question for Zeno’ the speaker reveals, through a series of letters to Zeno of Elea, that she recently left a coercive relationship in which she gave her entire savings to her abusive ex. The underpinnings of the male as potentially threatening can be found elsewhere in more subtly ways too, such as in ‘How to leave a marriage’ in which the speaker says:

        I thought if I talked to him long enough

        maybe I would too, though I was wary of men and hoped

        I would be forever, however grassy.
Life Without Air is at once smart, beautiful and eye-opening, full of wit and critique. Lafarge’s unique voice reverberates composing poems that stay with you, words you keep coming back to. She magnifies the toxicity in which we are tied to each other, and to the non-human, reminding us of our complicity in the destruction of the natural world.