Gregory Day

Here we observe the translator as a heightened inhabitant of her own world via someone else’s language.

What seemed like it was going to be a finely worked piece of anti-pastoral art is confused by a gestural obviousness akin to stadium rock.

It is a quandary of the currently abounding place-literature that by bringing such softening frames to so-called ‘wild’ places, and by writing so charmingly about them, authors are in fact robbing these places of the ‘wildness’ and the psychogeographical freedom they purport to love. Or are they?

Intrinsic to Tóibín’s work, from The South and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe through to Nora Webster, is a social realist reformulation of what were known in Catholic circles, once upon a time, as ‘holy mysteries’. You will find no cheap irony in Tóibín about this. He has made himself a conduit for the concept, with its rootedness in ordinary human failure, loss and vulnerability.

Take any one instance of Day’s work, any single essay, and for the sake of comparison you’d struggle to find a writer as impassioned by words, by diction and syntax, and as agog with wonder at natural phenomena at every scale beyond the human.