David Brooks



Possession, Landscape, the Unheimlich and Lionel Fogarty’s ‘Weather Comes’

A great many Australian poets are in an interesting and ironic state of dispossession, although perhaps only a small proportion of them actually feels that way – that proportion, let’s say, whose subjects and predispositions draw them towards the landscape, its flora and fauna, and their human experience thereof and thereupon.

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J S Harry’s ‘tunnel vision’, Vicious Sydney and The Car Story

As I began this essay on J S Harry’s poem ‘Tunnel Vision’ several years ago (2006) the radio drive shows in Sydney were full of opinions, mainly angry, concerning a report that a male teacher, in an English class, encouraging students to find as many words in ‘Australia’ as they could, had led the way by showing them how it contains the word ‘slut’, and then, when asked what that meant – it must have been a young primary-school class – had told them that it was a word used to describe women.

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Natural Selection: Ecological Postcolonialism as Bearing on Place

Australian poetry reminds us that we cannot encounter the natural world except by cultural means.

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2015 Val Vallis Winners

Winner: ‘Precedent‘ by Andrew Last That rare thing: a non-ponderous sonnet sequence full of surprising imagery, humour and light touches. The poet is obviously at home with the form, the way they vary stanzas and run meaning from one sonnet …

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Review Short: David Brooks’s Open House

In Open House, David Brooks makes it look easy. These poems appear to be simply set down, flawless panes of glass framing scenes from a life. For the attentive reader, however, even one who doesn’t know the extent of Brooks’s work as a poet, a novelist, an editor, a translator, a researcher and writer of books about other poets and poetries, there are clues to the years of deep thinking, constant writing and serious, engaged living that Brooks brings to his own practice.

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Paul Hetherington Reviews The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry

John Kinsella is an Australian poet with a high profile and a long record of achievement, including winning the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also an assiduous anthologiser. Most notably, he edited The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), one of the more successful of recent attempts to establish an indicative canon of Australian poetry (although this was not, perhaps, Kinsella’s avowed intention with that book).

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INDONESIA Editorial

0$). So why Indonesia? How did I come to get in touch with Sapardi Djoko Damono in the first place, let alone McGlynn, Cole and Herliany? During the time I was learning the rigging of ropes and jibs that intertwine …

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Ali Alizadeh Reviews David Brooks

‘Ern Malley? Again?’ asks David Brooks at the outset of this new reading of what is, arguably, the central event in the history of modern Australian poetry. Brooks’s account is an engrossing, at times exhilarating journey through the landscape of early-mid twentieth century Modernist poetry, but it also leaves the question of the need for yet another volume about the infamous hoax more or less unanswered.

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Matt Hetherington Reviews David Brooks

In a review originally published in Heat #6, David Brooks praised Peter Boyle’s The Blue Cloud of Crying as being influenced by the tradition of Cante Jondo or deep song, and as being more accessible, recognisable, and emotionally engaged than most Australian poetry. He then went on to observe: “There has been something of a tradition of emotional reserve in Australian poetry.

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Text and Paratext: Ern Malley and the Function of the Author

The immediate target of the Malley hoax was Max Harris and those associated with Angry Penguins, but McAuley and Stewart also had ‘bigger fish’, as it were, in mind. Herbert Read in particular, the English poet and critic—whose writings were a significant influence on Max Harris’ own poetry and aesthetics—was very much in the hoaxers’ sights.

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Between Virtue and Innocence: In Defence of Prose Poetry

Each virtue responds to a specific form of innocence. Innocence is moral instinct. Virtue is prose, innocence is poetry. – Novalis Long before Romanticism, poetry was thought to whisper with a sound which was the sound of Nature purified; poetry …

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