Swept away: Where the pillars of the earth and the wonders of the sea abound …
Novelist and poet Gregory Day glories in the natural world in his first major poetry collection.
I read this poetry collection by Gregory Day on a verandah where the air was thick with petrichor and bright red bottlebrush flowers were sheltering rainbow lorikeets – a perfect setting for a work that celebrates the ongoing wonders of the planet through accomplished lyrical poetry evoking place.
There is much beauty in these poems and I was immediately drawn in and swept away.
While this is his first major collection, Day is an acclaimed author and musician from the west coast of Victoria – a previous winner of the Patrick White Award, The Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the Nature Conservancy Australia Writing Prize.
The poems collected in this volume have been written over many years, Day describing them as “foundational for his prize-winning novels”.
In the opening standalone piece, Little Marsh – an introduction, the poet presents a short philosophy of what he feels writing poetry needs to be:
“We need these books that do not capture but release – a near miraculous act – books that celebrate not just mentally, emotionally, optically, sonically, but in-the-round and elementally, from that, yes, eternal impulse to sing and say … with the heart’s mind … / perhaps by the fire, perhaps / in the garden, perhaps even in the middle of maelstrom and chaos.” So, to be as well as to see.
Day’s work is threaded with constant questions and contains much memorable imagery
Day’s poems are sometimes down-to-earth, sometimes lyrical, with many responding to flora and fauna and the imaginings of the non-human such as in The Subtle Track of the Wallaby Mind that ends:
… I scamp towards the source, I bound like / a surrealist, unbind from the foam of the creek, I stop in spate not to / think again but to chew on stillness // Perhaps it’s then, feeling so perfectly at home, that I spill the / tannin creek down my belly front? But who keeps sprinkling rust / onto my nape as I look down?
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In the wonderful poem series Visitor, poems are written by, or about, the cow, the sparrow, the goat, the panther and a number of other creatures.
Author and poet Gregory Day.
Day’s work is threaded with constant questions and contains much memorable imagery. I particularly related to Grass Tree School, with an epigraph from Seamus Heaney that cites Tacitus, as I have walked through bushland full of grass trees myself for years on my way to work: It’s strange having to talk with grass trees / but there are no tourist guides of this coast’s genocides, /so as documents stand the hillside’s shimming fronds. / … Like Odysseus at a feast without instruments / there is something inexplicable in it all
Southsightedness is released as an elegant hardback edition with a wonderful organic jacket design that would make an ideal gift for a poetry lover or someone who relishes writing that encapsulates beauty, humour and inventive power.
These poems will delight the reader with their variety of forms – free verse, series, sonnets, lists, narrative poems, poems that repeat, and many others. We are drawn into the eye of the poet’s world and mind, and are both refreshed and enlightened by what we find there. I recommend these deeply intimate poems to you.
Southsightedness by Gregory Day, Transit Lounge, $32.99, transitlounge.com.au
Jane Frank is a Brisbane poet, editor and academic. Her most recent collection is Ghosts Struggle to Swim (Calanthe Press, 2023).