Equilibrium — Theresa Lola
Equilibrium in the Youth and Age Cluster
Theresa Lola closes the Youth and Age cluster with a poem that holds a birth and a death in the same breath. Equilibrium comes from her debut collection, In Search of Equilibrium (2019), a book built largely from elegy for her grandfather, who lived with Alzheimer’s disease before he died. In this poem she remembers her brother’s birth and naming ceremony as moments that also marked the progress of her grandfather’s decline — two family events, arriving and departing, folded into a single scene.
The Poet: Theresa Lola
Lola was born in Lagos and moved to London at the age of thirteen, later graduating from the University of Hertfordshire in 2015. She became Young People’s Laureate of London for 2019 to 2020, and in 2019 she was invited to read at the unveiling of Millicent Fawcett’s statue in Parliament Square — a sign of how central her voice had become to public poetry in the capital. She also teaches creative writing in London schools and universities, work that connects directly to a cluster built around encounters between the young and the old.
Lola’s debut collection, In Search of Equilibrium, is essentially a sequence of elegy for her grandfather, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease before his death. ‘Equilibrium’ is one poem from that sequence, remembering her brother’s naming ceremony as a moment shadowed by her grandfather’s illness.
What Happens in the Poem
The poem sets up a stark juxtaposition between a newborn’s cry and her grandfather’s fading awareness. Lola remembers the family gathered for her brother’s naming ceremony, a celebration that should be pure happiness, but her grandfather is present in body only, his memory already unravelling. The title works on two levels: it names the search for balance between a life beginning and a life ending, and it carries a private irony, since her grandfather had a professional understanding of equilibrium, yet his own health had become defined by imbalance as Alzheimer’s took hold.
The poem’s central irony is that a man once professionally acquainted with the idea of equilibrium ends his life in profound imbalance. Lola places this personal irony against the wider idea of the collection — that birth and death exist on the same continuum, each shaping how we understand the other.
Lola uses enjambment between the poem’s first two stanzas, carrying the celebration of the naming ceremony straight into the reality of her grandfather’s decline without giving the reader a breath to prepare. Elsewhere she uses caesura to capture her grandfather’s hesitant pauses at the ceremony, dramatising his struggle to keep pace with names and words that once came naturally to him. The structure moves between the ceremony’s present moment and the encroaching sense of loss, so that form itself performs the poem’s idea of two states in uneasy balance.
Lola builds an extended metaphor around stopwatches, picturing her grandfather’s life ticking down like time being measured and running out — an image that turns the abstract idea of mortality into something mechanical and precise. She chooses the word “wailed” for her brother’s first cry, a raw, almost animal sound that captures the shock and violence of arriving into life. Elsewhere she repurposes the everyday idiom of a dying person’s days being “numbered,” turning a familiar cliché of loss into the exact, clinical language of her grandfather’s prognosis. Early in the poem a shocking simile likens the grandfather's silence after the naming ceremony to a body opened for a post-mortem, treating the living man as though he were already a corpse and unsettling the reader before the elegiac tone settles.
Comparisons Across the Cluster
‘Baby Song’ by Thom Gunn makes a useful comparison partner: Gunn’s newborn narrator resents leaving the womb from the inside, while Lola watches birth from the outside as a family celebration darkened by illness — comparing the two shows how differently poets can unsettle what should be pure joy. ‘Prayer’ by Zaffar Kunial also links a birth to a death in the family, tracing his own birth against his mother’s final illness, so comparing pacing and tone between the two poems reveals how each writer balances arrival and loss. ‘Tea With Our Grandmothers’ by Warsan Shire commemorates fading grandparents through culturally specific, concrete detail, much as Lola fixes her grandfather in memory before Alzheimer’s erases him — comparing their imagery shows two ways of resisting forgetting. ‘Happy Birthday Moon’ by Raymond Antrobus also explores naming and inheritance across generations, though Antrobus focuses on a father teaching a son to say his own name while Lola focuses on a grandfather barely following a naming ceremony — comparing how each poet uses repetition or caesura shows two versions of communication breaking down between generations.
Using Equilibrium in the Exam
If ‘Equilibrium’ is the printed anthology poem, the paired unseen poem will explore a related idea — perhaps a family occasion overshadowed by illness, or a poem that also holds birth and death together. Compare ideas and attitudes (does each poet find balance, or only imbalance?), tone and atmosphere (celebratory against elegiac), and the effects of specific techniques such as caesura, enjambment and extended metaphor. ‘Equilibrium’ also works well as the poem chosen from memory for the second part of the question, whenever the set idea concerns generational bonds, memory and forgetting, or the cycle of birth and death — the short, exact quotations “wailed” and “numbered” are worth learning precisely because they carry so much meaning in so few words.