Sarah Day
Sarah Day’s books have won awards including the Queensland Premier’s and ACT poetry prizes. Her books have also been shortlisted for the NSW, Tasmanian Premier’s, and Prime Minister’s awards. In 2017 she received the Alan Marshall short story prize. She has collaborated with musicians in the UK and Australia, and judged national poetry, fiction, and nature-writing competitions, and taught creative writing to year 12 students for twenty years. Her ninth collection, Slack Tide (Pitt Street Poetry), was published in 2022.
Photograph credit: Gordon Harrison-Williams
In times of war
At high tide there’s a breakaway from pounding surf.Some of the ocean has tired of the incessant batteringand steals over the beach away from the refractory swell.
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In 1990, composer and artistic director Konstantin Koukias and production director Werner Ihlenfeld founded IHOS Opera in Tasmania. Audiences were excited and astonished by the scale and ambition of the director’s vision when they attended his earlier, spectacular productions such as Days and Nights of Christ, To Traverse Water, and Tesla. IHOS works became associated with huge spaces.
Tesla to ... (read more)
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions … From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old.
Virginia Woolf, in her seminal essay on modern fiction (1919), might have been describing Claire Potter ... (read more)
Damen O’Brien’s first collection is an exceptional accomplishment. His individual poems have won several competitions (including the 2017 Peter Porter Poetry Prize). O’Brien signals the emphases of Animals with Human Voices in his afterword, stating that the world has become a ‘meaner’ place during the ten years of its completion: ‘a place of harsh politics, that values outrage over ki ... (read more)
for Gabriella Smart
There’s no getting away from things.There is driving, then walking milesalong a quiet coast on a rising tide –with the back-of-the-mind consciousnessthat in an hour or so the seawill have reached the cliffs of shalewith their pebble threads to denote other epochsof Earth events and that you will be wading in wateron return. There is walking the distance to seethe Monarch b ... (read more)
And to the other men from Afghanistan,and Iran and Iraq, who prepared a feast for meone midday, years ago on my way to work,laid the clean sheet smoothon the worn carpet of the furnitureless house,placed dishes of spiced rice and chickpeas,and slid a plate towards me –there were not enough platesto go around – and with upturned palmsurged me to eat first,I want to thank you and sayI’ll alway ... (read more)
A. E. Houseman memorably said: I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat. It’s not an easy matter to justify one’s decisions when faced with numerous poems from which to make a limited selection. There’s no programmatic guide to what makes a poem successful although the impact of a good poem is something we all know and recognise. Generally it has something to do with reg ... (read more)
For its small population, Tasmania has produced, or attracted from elsewhere, a significant number of published poets, past and present. Not all have loved the place. In the case of Gwen Harwood, the island state was her prison, or at least that’s what she told her friends: ‘I HATE HOBART’, ‘When do we leave?’ and ‘Get me outa here’. ‘My only fear is that I’ll die before I get ou ... (read more)