
Towards Light
(Puncher & Wattmann 2018)
To the vanishing point where light will expand/where light wants the eye to go
(“Towards Light”)
Light, as a physical and metaphorical entity recurs in many of the poems in this new collection by Sarah Day. Light makes its presence felt in these poems as a source of illumination and grace, it is also the means by which the flaws and discrepancies of the present and past are highlighted.
“Sarah Day is a poet of wonderful attentiveness. She notices everything, persuading us, as readers, that she has seen and heard the living world truly. Wherever she stands, she gives lyrical utterance in Towards Light to our fresh, daily life, vibrant in its perpetuity.”
“Exquisitely nuanced, vivid and brilliant, Towards Light observes the natural world with grace and artistry and generously offers to her readers the gift of rapture.”
Introduction
This collection is concerned with specificity and the figurative. There’s a delight in the joys of the natural world, but the natural world needs intense human perception to survive the pressure we are placing it under, and humans managing to be human need intense understanding as well. Sarah Day looks closely, and considers carefully what she sees, what is experienced, what is lost — she ‘is not insensible to change’ any more than the world itself is — and also what is to be cherished.
Judge’s Commendation for the Wesley Michel Wright Prize 2018
“In this collection, Sarah Day shows a quiet mastery of poetic form, recalibrating rhythm and rhyme scheme to register the tremors of everyday experience that point to more seismic shifts of feeling, affiliation, and identity. Water and air are the elements from which Day composes her visions of light and flight. In her poems, words are restored to their original powers of illumination and elevation.”