Southsightedness

In this deeply intimate and strikingly beautiful poetry collection, twice-shortlisted Miles Franklin Award author Gregory Day celebrates the ongoing wonders of the earth and sea while calling time on the superficial divisions we have created between ideas of nature and culture.

Southsightedness offers a way of being as well as seeing. It details a very direct and local world but one made universal by the poet's art. This is a world of reality and the imagination, a world of damaged and regenerating ecologies, where the poet lives surrounded by family, animals, weather, sport, tourism, and the layers of history.

With lyrical craft and inventive power, Southsightedness offers deep aesthetic pleasure but in an often-down-to-earth way. In part a survey of the past as well as a navigational guide for the future, it is a vivid poetic catalogue of a 21st century cultural landscape, where all things are interconnected, including sound and sense, beauty and humour, truth and joy.

About the Author

Gregory Day is a writer and musician from the west coast of Victoria, Australia. He lives on Wadawurrung tabayl. Gregory is a winner of the Patrick White Award, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize. He has twice been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, most recently in 2024 for The Bell of the World.