Cirrus@Austlit

'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 earth-moving 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.' (Publication summary)

'University of Western Australia Publishing has just released the first of three volumes of John Kinsella’s Collected Poems.' (Introduction)

'Our lives with non-human animals are characterised by a kind of unremitting contempt. Habits of life, traditions of thought, and failures of imagination have rendered us blind to their invitations to companionship within a shared world. And philosophy has offered little to assuage our moral incomprehension, our soul blindness. Over the last few decades, it has fallen increasingly to novelists, like J.M. Coetzee, and poets, like David Brooks – artists whose language has slipped the leash of ‘pure reason – to awaken us to the possibility of a moral encounter with non-human animals. Brooks’ Turin is truly a startling achievement. It startles us from an impoverished slumber, leaving us wondering how we could have been so blind to the gentle presence, the insistent voices, the sly wisdom, the subtle reproach, the offers of friendship held out by our non-human companions. The world cannot help but look different once Brooks rips away the veil of our all-too-human conceit.'  (Publication summary)