Exquisite and challenging essays on the wonders of the natural world and the cultural complexities of writing landscape in Australia
A collection of beautiful and moving essays on the wonder of the natural world and the cultural complexities of writing landscape in Australia
'Words are Eagles collects in one place the essays of award-winning novelist and nature writer, Gregory Day. Grounded in the landscape of southwestern Victoria, and infused with the heightened sense of place and environmental literacy that have long been key to Day's work, these essays traverse landscape, language and histories.
'Day's attention is tuned both to beauty of the natural world, returning often to the motifs of ground and sky, ocean and owl, moth and river, and the history of place - whether lost, buried or personal.
'In a part a reading and celebration of the resurgent global nature writing movement, to which Day was an early contributor, this collection highlights the need for ecological care and value of Indigenous knowledge and practices.
'This is the kind of nature writing that gets to the heart of our urgent need for a more harmonious and regenerative relationship with the earth that sustains us.' (Publication summary)
'An exploration into the cultural complexities of writing about nature in Australia.'
'Award-winning novelist and essayist Gregory Day has written widely on subjects as varied as the powerful owl and Australian poetry. Many of his nonfiction essays have appeared in notable literary publications over the years, each demonstrating Day’s eye for detail and ability to fold the metaphysical resonances of landscape within personal histories.' (Introduction)
Gregory Day’s essay collection Words are Eagles is carefully subtitled: “Selected Writings on the Nature and Language of Place”.
'Across Australia today, exciting work is being done to strengthen and renew Aboriginal languages and their deep associations with Country. In those parts of the continent where the history of dispossession has been most traumatic, language regeneration calls for research and reconstruction, for the rediscovery of the old words for places, features, and life itself. Gregory Day’s new book is a distinguished and discerning quest for the lore and language of his beloved place. It eloquently reflects on what it means for a non-Indigenous fifth-generation Australian to seek to live ‘in a properly symbiotic way, in this soil’. Words Are Eagles is more than a book of ‘selected writings’: it is a sustained manifesto for how to think and feel one’s way into Australian nature, place, and history following invasion and at a time of global environmental crisis.' (Introduction)
Gregory Day’s essay collection Words are Eagles is carefully subtitled: “Selected Writings on the Nature and Language of Place”.
'Award-winning novelist and essayist Gregory Day has written widely on subjects as varied as the powerful owl and Australian poetry. Many of his nonfiction essays have appeared in notable literary publications over the years, each demonstrating Day’s eye for detail and ability to fold the metaphysical resonances of landscape within personal histories.' (Introduction)
