‘Sarah Day’s poems... enable me, the reader, to recapture the lost intensity of my own perceptions. And the words are chosen to detonate differently each time I come to rest on them.’ Robert Dessaix

Poems on this web site

• Lufthansa pilot
• Goldstein's Drapery
• Eating the Sea With Lunch
• Jersey Cow

‘Demands to be regarded as one of the most considerable of modern Australian poets.’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘This is the poetry of vivacity: language leaping off the page.’ Chris Wallace-Crabbe

‘Whatever Sarah Day does, she brings words to a pitch and invites one to join a horde of readings.’ HEAT

"The poems of Sarah Day draw us back into the connectedness of our world, a flowing interplay between the human and other species, large or delicate. She is both observer and participant. Her pinpoint diction and elastic syntax stretch our assumptions by way of aesthetic play. This is the poetry of vivacity: language leaping off the page."

Australian poet, Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Sarah Day was born in England in 1958 and grew up in Tasmania. Her 1987 collection, 'A Hunger to be Less Serious', won the Anne Elder award for a first volume of poetry in 1987 and 'A Madder Dance' was shortlisted for the NBC Banjo Awards. Her latest work, Poems New and Selected, published in the UK by Arc Publications, received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation in the Winter of 2002.

Sarah has received grants from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council and Arts Tasmania and was resident at the BR Whiting Library in Rome. Her poems have been put to music by British composer Anthony Gilbert. She is Poetry Editor of Island Magazine and lives in Hobart with her partner and two young daughters. She has taught English and Creative Writing for a number of years at university and pre-tertiary level. She has been a member of the Literature Fund of the Australia Council, has read her works at Adelaide Arts festivals, Melbourne Arts Festival, Tasmanian Writers Festivals and in 2001 at the Festival Franco Anglais De Poesie, a translation based festival in Paris. (Source: PoeticA, ABC Radio National 3 p.m. Saturday, 11 May 2002.)

Books by Sarah Day

The Ship. Brandl & Schlesinger, ISBN 1 876040 59 9
$22.95; 80pp pb

Poems New and Selected. Arc, 2002. "The selection of poems in this book - taken from Sarah Day's three published books and concluding with a substantial body of new work - reflects continuities: the eye for detail and ear for cadence; the process of distilling experience for its essentials; and the power of the image." (review, Arc Publications)

Quickening. Ringwood, Victoria : Penguin Books, 1997.

A Madder Dance
Ringwood, Victoria : Penguin, 1991.

Sarah Day: Selected work
Pamphlet Poets Series, National Library of Australia, 1990.

A Hunger to be Less Serious
Angus & Robertson, 1987.