The Day Before
Aoife Lyall
(Author)
Description
Focusing on the earliest weeks and months of the pandemic, Aoife Lyall's The Day Before beautifully captures the ordinary moments in life that crystallise in the face of crisis and threat.
These intimate and meticulous poems mark the lived experience of someone who must navigate a world she no longer understands, exploring first steps and last breaths, milestones, millstones, emigration, fly-tipping and the entire world to be found in the space behind the front door.
Tender, challenging, and historically significant, The Day Before asks what it means when home is the one place you cannot leave, and the one place you cannot go.
Product Details
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books |
| Publish Date | May 07, 2024 |
| Pages | 64 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781780376905 |
| Dimensions | 8.9 X 6.0 X 0.4 inches | 0.3 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
'Her theme is 'heaven in the ordinary' - moments of illumination in everyday life. Written during the pandemic (chillingly evoked in the poem 'Moss'), these moments become necessary for survival. There's an imagist precision here, with real emotional power.' - Graeme Richardson, The Sunday Times, on The Day Before
'There's an undercurrent of suffering to Aoife Lyall's second collection, The Day Before, much of which coheres around the disorientating days of lockdown; its odd rituals, barriers and a looming atmosphere of bureaucratic dread ... There's an elegiac tone to some of the work...and here, the use of gesture and withholding, of feeling by absence, is...effective.' - Declan Ryan, The Irish Times
'The Day Before is remarkable for the assured, luminous quality of each of its poems .... The Day Before is a deceptively complex collection - though its beautiful language and celebration of the everyday create a quiet magic, there is a pervading sense of melancholy as Lyall uncovers the loss in our lives, including the loss of childhood and innocence; the environmental losses we see around us every day; the loss of security in a world marked by pandemic.' - Rosamund Taylor, Poetry Ireland Review
'The poems in the book ask important, challenging questions of lives lived in the face of existential crises.' - The Scotsman, Poem of the Week, on The Day Before
'Mother, Nature by Aoife Lyall was an incredibly powerful book. It was extremely moving to read it. I came to this not really knowing quite what to expect, but I found myself blown away by the visceral nature of the writing. It's an extremely moving and at times deeply upsetting book in the way it treats its subject matter, which deals with loss, remembrance, regret and grief. These are all extremely powerful themes and I think that Aoife presents them in a way that is both powerful, but also accessible.' - Vincent Lal, Co-Judge, Scottish First Book Award
'Aoife Lyall's debut, Mother, Nature, explores pregnancy, loss, motherhood, hospitals and grief in moving lyric poems that amount to an extended sequence - the thematic resonance of the collection is detailed, and shows a thoroughness in its consideration of small moments of private grief... One of Lyall's most effective techniques is the exploration of paradox, the volta-like turning of the lyric and its imagery, which makes the best poems here particularly devastating in their contained forms.'--Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times'There are poems in this collection that knocked me clean to the ground, as others offered me a warm hand up and others still, which stroked my backbone as I sobbed. The subject is crucial, but it's the beauty of the poems which hold it all together. "By law she carries you" is a line that I will never get out of my skin.' - Hollie McNish, bestselling UK poet, on Mother, Nature
'Aoife Lyall's Mother, Nature is a beautiful and moving collection - a fine debut.' - Michael Longley, award-winning Irish poet
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