Gregory Day

Gregory Day won the Patrick White Award in 2020. His book of essays, Words Are Eagles: Selected Writings on the Nature and Language of Place, will be published by Upswell in July.
Photo: Simon O’Dwyer.
All essays by Gregory Day
Betraying the Loch: Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
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?
The submerged moon: Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín
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.