Sarah Day is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including Tempo (2013) shortlisted for The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, The Ship (2004) winner of the Judith Wright Calanthe Queensland Premier’s Award for Poetry and joint winner of the Judith Wright Prize ACT National Poetry Awards, and most recently Slack Tide (2022). A former editor of Island Magazine, Day was born in England and grew up in Hobart, Tasmania. Her poems often engage with the natural world and the ways in which domestic experience connects to history and society at large. Day’s poems are also noteworthy for their formal skill and musicality.
“Fe” from 2018’s Towards Light is a quiet sonnet with a subtle rhyme scheme and a clever turn: magnetic north, with its subterranean loops and seemingly planchette-like randomness, should confuse, “but fails.” Instead, the pole’s diurnal shift “quietly adjusts our compasses, our hearts” to align us with the movements of the natural world.
Fe
Magnetic north is always on the move,
looping its slow deep subterranean loops
around true north which it eludes
like an errant partner in an Arctic dance. Whoops –
gliding now at forty k per year from Canada
towards Siberia like a planchette on a Ouija –
anyone would think these shifts might derange
a home-bound salmon and rearrange
the map for pigeon, turtle, snow goose
or the coded alphabet inside the honey bee
dance; it all seems set to confuse
but fails. Blood hears more than its own euphony
as the sliding behemoth in fits and starts
quietly adjusts our compasses, our hearts.
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Author: Thomas Moody
