Tempo

Time and motion are undercurrents in these new poems by Sarah Day. Her subjects encompass the commonplace in the Australian landscape: the remnant beak of a raven, tree shadows in urban streets, industrial cranes and mowing-machines, as well as the exotic or peculiar: the world seed bank in Norway, artefacts in Pompeii, Graeco-Egyptian funeral portraits, the landscape paintings of John Glover, the Earth as seen from elsewhere in the Milky Way.

These poems, individually and collectively, invite questions about the enigmatic nature of past, present and future. Tempo showcases Sarah Day's imagination in exuberant bloom. Her poems are philosophical, lustrous and deserving of wide praise.

"These masterly poems follow 'the traffic of ideas from the known world', travelling along cultural trajectories—from the ancient waters of Mareotis to the glimmering port of Hobart—to arrive at a 'radiant in-pouring' of dawn: 'a casual, brilliant right of entry'." — Bronwyn Lea