This is Sarah Day’s ninth collection and one of her most thematically diverse to date. She brings to the poems a thoughtful mix of environmentalism (particularly the unruly yet quiet presence of Tasmania’s natural beauty), her British roots (some of the best poems in the collection refer to the poet’s grandmother’s incarceration in an asylum), and a teacher’s precision with free verse. The poems are not overly experimental in terms of lineation, metre, language, or punctuation, and yet freshness of perspective and authenticity arise inevitably from the poet’s liquid observational engagement with the world’s affairs, whether this be with landscape, the global pandemic, racism, or science (planetary, oceanographic, microscopic).

While reviewing Slack Tide, I was reading the New Collected Poems of the late Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944–2020). I felt uncanny resonances between Day’s and Boland’s fine, linguistic intelligence, the pure melody of their poems, and their feminism’s intense engagement with the world and its histories, as filtered through the lens of mythic reinvention and domestic experience. There are some wonderful ekphrastic poems in Day’s collection (a favoured form of Boland’s). For instance, in the poem ‘House like a Folktale’, a mysterious house in Glenbrook – ‘The bowed house / rests comfortably on earth / itself a resting hen’ – assumes the qualities of a Chagall painting where a rhetorical, surreal conversation takes place between locale and visual imagery, and the poet muses, ‘Rules are what people think, / they aren’t a law of nature.’

Day shares with Boland a wonderful aptitude for situating local intuitive concerns into a dialogue with the larger world and its histories. Lockdown is imagined as an Edward Hopper interior. Four-hundred-year-old Neopolitan music on the radio (‘In the Air’) unpacks thoughts of environmental degradation, yet the poem leaves us with lingering hope, ‘notes were made on a score – / the compassionate moment hangs in the air’. Even the collection’s smaller observational sketches – such as ‘School Strike for Climate’, with its opening lines ‘They held our planet in their hands / the way that I once held an orange or a ball’ – coolly and compassionately reflect a kind of looking forward into the generations. Here, also, are some lines from ‘Penstock Lagoon’, a reflective poem about the Ukraine war, selected by editors Jeanine Leanne and Judith Beveridge for Australian Poetry’s Best Australian Poems 2022: ‘Up here, in the tent at night / by an effort of will, the world’s troubles / shrink from the mind’s large screen …’ The poet continually hears an indecipherable sound in the silence, which is finally identified: ‘it is not a falling pearl but a musk duck’. The poem then widens its perspective: