In Quickening, her third collection of poetry, Sarah Day's unique creative voice once again reverberates with her acute power of observation and dark irony. These are poems of discourse and enquiry. Public in concern and personal in tone, they reveal voyages of the mind and body, juxtapose the domestic and the foreign, and test the limits of language. In many of her poems, the narrative voice is a mother's, overlaying intimate experience with philosophical distance. Quickening is a deft collection that defies a passive reading.