Sandygold

Gregory Day is best known as a prize-winning novelist, but it should not surprise his readers to learn that he has, in Southsightedness, made the move to lyric poetry. The lyrical has always figured in his work, which, as well as novels, includes essays, criticism, and music. (Indeed, poetry can be found in Day’s forays into that occult genre, the artist’s book.) Day’s lyricism is not, and has never been, the breathless kind that traffics in the precious and the inconsequential. For Day, the lyrical mode attends to language’s most powerful affective and cognitive potentialities, doing so both through the linguistic intensity of the poetic idiolect, and an engagement with the daytime domains of politics, history, and the material world.