Gregory Day

In a recent review of novelist László Krasznahorkai’s work, American poet Ange Mlinko described how, when she first read his Seiobo There Below she thought she had discovered “a sutra of a cult I had been unconsciously following for most …

Anytime Before Byzantium From the back deck I hear the swans cry look up, and see them winging by. Each of them contain two motifs: The curlicue 2 when on the water the eelneck & bodybulb when on the air. That …

The kindred nature of beauty and mortality is a feature of Madeleine Dale’s first full-length collection of poetry, Portraits of Drowning, which sets its provenance firmly in a romanticism for which such tragic symbiotics were a chief adornment. The …

Recently, preparing to interview Rosie Batty about her new book, Hope, I took a statistical deep dive into the shadowland of male violence against women in this country. As they say, the numbers don’t lie. Almost half of police time is spent …

Anne Carson’s earliest childhood memory is of her three-year-old self dreaming of being asleep, so it feels appropriate to be meta here. Also to risk a reviewer’s pitfall: the involuntary stylistic mimicry of the writer being reviewed. Typically this …

Despite its title, Colm Tóibín’s new novel, Long Island, is largely set in the small Irish town of Enniscorthy in County Wexford. This is a fictionalised version of the town where Tóibín grew up. It is also the setting, at least in part, …

Middlemarch   Midweek, Grassy Creek she reads Middlemarch in the waves   her gaze cretaceous water marbles   characters thinking in deep pools   before editing to shallow destinations.   Her ankles frill she …

In Our Strangers, Booker International Prize-winning writer Lydia Davis once again offers us a diverse range of story forms: creatures of the habitat of her mind, or her notebook, which often seem interchangeable. She is also an esteemed translator …

Our attempt to regenerate a damaged Earth requires creative and chthonic stimuli far beyond the necessary physical work of composting and planting, tending and conserving. With her new book, The Language of Trees: How Trees Make Our World, …

As a dweller of the littoral, my love of birds was initially fired by the “otherness” of seabirds. Years ago, researching for a never-finished book, I spent many landlocked hours in the old Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union (RAOU) archive in …

The power of simile and metaphor often hits its peak in the poetic line. When describing something as apparently commonplace as soil, a writer might be forgiven for unleashing all their rhetorical strategies to enliven the topic. But as Alisa Bryce shows …

Great literature is properly immune to spoilers, having at its core an ambiguity of truth sourced directly from the complex and often contradictory essences of life itself. It isn’t enough that something dramatic, or even beautiful, happens in a story: …

“Atchison believed a church bell would be like the belt of his trousers. It would save him, save us all, from embarrassment. I have heard that many men in these parts see no need for conventional accoutrements such as underpants, but a bell was of a different …”