gaslit air

Winner of a 2017 Eric Gregory Award, Daisy Lafarge published her pamphlet understudies for air (Sad Press, £6), from which the poem ‘gaslit air’ is taken, last year. Lafarge writes: “What would an ‘understudy’ poem look like? A poem that is not quite ready to be a poem but might get called to the stage to act like one. Artists make sketches before moving on to the final work, but often sketches are the work… This notion – that I wasn’t writing poems but something towards poems – took off a significant amount of pressure, and is maybe why I wrote them in a more concentrated period than I have with anything else.”

I was told to conduct my body like an hourglass, to stand on my head and turn the blood cells regularly. the sky throbbed sideways like a haemorrhage. soon I became one with my public face, hid fragments in the small print of undergrowth, chastised them for not being whole.

You can find a copy of understudies for air by Daisy Lafarge at the Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, Edinburgh EH8 8DT. For poetry inquiries, e-mail reception@spl.org.uk or visit www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk.