David Brooks

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a magnificent writer – Frank Morehouse

one of Australia’s most skilled, unusual and versatile writers – Peter Pierce, Sydney Morning Herald

the most eccentric writer in Oceania – Davide Brollo, Pangea

master of the short lyric poem – Judith Beveridge, Southerly

with Brooks to guide me, I might be ready for anything – Jane Sullivan, Australian Book Review

Nobody writes about animals the way David Brooks does – Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Forthcoming August 1

A.D. Hope: A Literary Friendship, Brandl & Schlesinger

A.D. (Alec) Hope (1907-2000) was one of the most significant Australian poets of the twentieth century: satirist, scholar, master of erotic verse and of the discursive mode, author of poems (‘Australia’, ‘The Death of the Bird’) that, along with the works of Patrick White, Judith Wright and Manning Clarke, scripted Australian thought for decades. David Brooks, forty-six years his junior, first met Hope when, as a student, the ANU asked him to photograph the poet for a building they had just named after him. A friendship formed that lasted twenty-five years, saw Brooks become Hope’s editor, and eventually give the poet’s eulogy. Penetrating, surprising, and supported by an intimate knowledge both of the poetry and of the man himself, this memoir of their relationship is a must for readers of Hope and of Brooks alike.

Recent

The Other Side of Daylight: New and Selected Poems, University of Queensland Press, 2024

Available from UQP, major online retailers and selected bookstores.

A selection of poems from each of David’s previous collections – The Cold Front (1983), Walking to Point Clear (2005), Urban Elegies (2007), The Balcony (2008), and Open House (2016) – and a full collection of new poems, The Peanut Vendor.

‘The Other Side of Daylight bursts out of these pages into an advocacy for animal rights, life rights and the restorative qualities of language itself.’ – John Kinsella

‘Furious and exquisite, resonant and mournful, these are compassionate, blazing, fortifying poems.’ – Felicity Plunkett

‘As Cheng writes, “A masterpiece is that which restores the secret relationship between things, and the breath that animates it as well.” This masterly collection by one of our most important writers deserves to be celebrated.’ – John Hawke, Australian Book Review, May 2024

‘a great contemporary poet’ – Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review, May 2024

Turin: Approaching Animals, Meditations, Brandl & Schlesinger, 2021

Available from major online retailers and selected bookstores.

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 moral encounter with non-human animals. Brooks’s Turin meditations are truly a startling achievement. They startle 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. – Scott Stephens

Turin is a book that can be dipped into anywhere and appreciated anytime for its stunning prose in which ethics, rhetoric and aesthetic expression merge: a bit like Nietzsche on a good day, maybe. - Jennifer Ann McDonnell, The Conversation

Animal Dreams, Sydney University Press, 2021

Seventeen essays in contemporary literature, thought and policy

Beautifully written, emotionally and intellectually enthralling. … They make you angry, they make you weep; they make you determined to rethink and to act. – Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, The Wild Man from Borneo

The Grass Library, Brandl & Schlesinger (AU) and Ashland Creek Press (USA & Canada).

‘A philosophical and poetic journey recounting the author’s relationship with his four sheep and other animals in his home in the Blue Mountains. Both memoir and eloquent testament to animal rights.’

One of the most beautifully written books about animals I have ever read. I know of nothing else like it published in this or any other country. Deep, sensitive, charming, instructive and above all, humble. I cannot imagine anyone reading it without coming away in some profound sense altered.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

a beautiful meditation on animality … a very special and important book.

Geordie Williamson

a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the minds of non-human animals.

Christine Townend, founder of Animal Liberation

Like Agamben and Derrida before him, Brooks chips away at the self-serving denials and falsehoods with which we think and write animals out of, rather than into, being.

Ben Brooker, Australian Book Review