The Other Side of Daylight

by David Brooks

Genres: Poetry

Mass Market Paperback

About the author

David Brooks has published several collections of poetry, short fiction and essays, and four novels, The House of Balthus (1995), The Fern Tattoo (2007), The Umbrella Club (2009) and The Conversation (2012). His work has been highly acclaimed, widely translated and anthologised, and shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, New South Wales Premier’s, Adelaide Festival and many other awards. In 2011 he published The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette, and a secret history of Australian poetry. He teaches Australian literature at the University of Sydney, is co-editor of the journal Southerly, lives in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, and spends a small part of each year in a village on the sea coast of Slovenia.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name.

Reviews

[Boy Blue · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of Brooks' work. I would have loved an editors note on what was chosen, and why they structured it essentially back to front. It starts with his newest stuff and then works backwards to his first published poetry collection The Cold Front. It's a really strange decision because in effect it creates a Benjamin Button type effect as the poet ages in reverse and his interests seem to disappear into the ground rather than bud and bloom. As such I'd recommend reading this backwards. Go to the back of the book and read The Cold Front first and then work your way towards the most recent Peanut Vendor.

Brooks' early fascination and interest in nature turns into full blown conservationism and veganism, as animal rights becomes the main focus of his poetry. Unfortunately, while a few of those later poems are touching, many of them function like blunt instruments and sorely lack the delicate touch of his earlier work. I understand that it's probably impossible for him to disconnect from the rage he feels at our treatment of animals but it's as if he's become an idealistic teenager in his seventies. Oddly, if you were to read the poems in the order they've been printed in this anthology you'd feel like Brooks grows up and abandons his early idealism for a more circumspect maturity, when it's actually the reverse.

I'd say The Balcony published in 2008 is his peak and the following work shows more his growing obsession with animal rights than a complete mastery of his craft. He has captured place exceptionally well, for example I'd challenge anyone who has spent some time in Cottesloe to not recognise The Pines, Cottesloe, I was transported there immediatley. His imagery is just so evocative.

...Already
in twos and threes
the gulls are returning
and one late crow
labouring like a man in mid-channel.

I've been that man in mid-channel and I've seen those gulls.

While sometimes he can be quite whimsical and delicate as in...

No Point In Staying Up Longer

No point in staying up longer,
thoughts all sad and astray,
the Six Sisters sound asleep long ago,
and the seventh away,
Orion gone off with his hounds somewhere
and the Great Bear sleeping,
Castor and Pollux and Aldebaran
so far up in the mountains now
dream-chasing
no one is calling them home.

Later this year I'll be getting married by the sea and for some reason this poem made me feel like I'd already had the wedding and this experience was exactly the one I'd had:

Gift

After we had paid the singer,
and the guests had gone
and we had cleared away the food and the glasses,
I went outside again
and the moon, which had been so high over the dancers,
was already four times larger
and even more full,
setting over the hills to the west,
sharpening the outline of the pines,
making the ridges shimmer,
and I thought of it shining
on the other side, beyond Isola, a long
silver path on the rippled water,
and of the silent ships out there
some of them with their lights still burning,
and of the sailors on watch,
smoking, and drinking quietly into the night,
and of what they might be thinking,
and I realised that, undeserved
and against all odds, something extraordinary had come upon me, a great
happiness,
and for once I didn't question it,
didn't ask why.

There are quite a few poems about writing poems. So Little, Golden Tongues, Barnyard Revelation Poem, No Poem For Weeks Nows to name a few.

There's also plenty of humour and he got many a snort out of me with poems like How Not To Be A Cosmologist and Without Warning. It seems however that humour is replaced by a burning rage about our cruelty to animals in his later work. Things that previously would have been funny become just straight up grim.

There's something about this one that is so spot on. I haven't spent much time in the Balkans but it's certainly how I imagine some women from there. It's a shame about the final line because I actually feel like it lets the rest of the poem down.

Balkan

She's still at the age
where she thinks that she's immortal,
smokes too much,
drives far too fast,
has the patience
of split quicksilver,
can drink almost anyone under the table,
claims that she has
a special dispensation from God,
maybe because she met the Pope once,
more likely because she's seen some things
and knows how to farm a secret;
has a revolver in her wardrobe,
a fetish for
knocking into people on the street,
hates, like she loves, unconditionally,
always gets what she wants,
wants me.

Favourites are as follows:

The Cold Front
- The Promises
- The Swineflower


Back After 8 Months Away
- So Little
- Without Warning


Walking to Point Clear
- Dinner at Midnight
- The Pines, Cottesloe


Urban Elegies
- Night Rain
- Menindee
- Pentecost


The Balcony
- Wait
- Balkan
- Gift
- Damage
- No Point In Staying Up Longer
- Twelth Night
- Pater Noster
- Yes


Open House
- A Place on Earth

The Peanut Vendor
I
- The Night Coming
- Linden

II
- Late Love Poem
- Spider Night

III
- How Yesterday
- Black Cockatoos

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

A satisfying collection of poems, maybe not memorable specifically but the poet's voice, the life as it is lived and the creatures, wild and saved, that inhabit his life - both as residents, visitors or observed - I loved. Also memorable are his observations on the human species and its cruelties to its own. On a bit of a David Brooks binge at the moment. Reading the poems is like seeing inside his mind and inwardly hearing his voice; a little mesmorised. His angle on the nonhuman species we share the planet with are not lecturing, just sudden, blunt observations interspersed with diary like poems about other life events so things seep in unexpected. There are poems too like lists, or words marching but quietly to a drumbeat, sad and condemning. And there gentle reflections and poems of pleasure. Well worth the reading this damp Sunday.