The Day Before
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.
Aoife Lyall is an Irish poet living in the Scottish Highlands. Awarded an Emerging Scottish Writer residency by Cove Park in 2020 and twice shortlisted for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Awards, she was longlisted for the inaugural Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize in 2018. Her debut collection Mother, Nature (Bloodaxe Books, 2021) was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book Award, one of Scotland’s National Book Awards 2021. She has worked as a guest curator for the Scottish Poetry Library and as a guest editor for Butcher’s Dog.
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