A stunning new work of poetry combined with a selection of the best of David Brooks’ award-winning career
A bottle of Romanee-Conti sells for $785,000, while bodies are dug by hand from earthquake rubble in Indonesia because the local government couldn’t afford the earthmoving equipment to do so while people were still alive. Elephants are shot and skinned by poachers and remote Indigenous communities are shut down for want of infrastructural funding. And with tenderness and humility, a simple gift of peanuts to magpies, sheep and a tentative rat reframes the place of the human in the world.
David Brooks’s longstanding concerns for justice and the relationship between human and non-human animals infuse and enliven his work. Wise, lyrical and timely, The Other Side of Daylight distils a long and honoured poetry career with a marvellous selection from his five previous volumes and The Peanut Vendor, a collection of forty-eight luminous new poems.
David Brooks is the author of five previous collections of poetry and several novels and works of short fiction. His The Book of Sei(1985) was heralded as the most impressive debut in Australian short fiction since Peter Carey’s. His novel The Fern Tattoo(UQP, 2007) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. The Sydney Morning Heraldcalled his collection of poetry, The Balcony(UQP, 2008), ‘an electric performance’. Until 2013 he taught Australian Literature at The University of Sydney. In recent years he has devoted his writing increasingly to animal advocacy. He lives with rescued sheep in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. In 2014 he was awarded a 2015/16 Australia Council Fellowship for services to Australian and international literature.
