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David Brooks

There are no lions to whelp in the street any more,

and conversely

the Council by-laws forbid

the keeping of the pigs and chickens, goats and cattle

whose prodigious multiplications

could serve as an adequate metaphor

and there are only so many burgeoning plants

you can squeeze into a one-by-three-metre courtyard

but the possums have come back,

and the daylight moon

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In these litigious days, should I declare a tenuous bias in favour of David Brooks (whom I know not at all)? According to an extensive list of previous publications, which includes poetry, short fiction, essays and one earlier novel, he has devoted several editorial enterprises to the poet A.D. Hope. I too admired Hope, for his passionate admiration for Russian literature, which he sometimes lectured on and which made him a complimentary examiner of my own PhD thesis. Otherwise, the slate is blank: I tried to locate Brooks’s previous novel, The House of Balthus (1995) as preparatory reading for this review, but the local library system could not help.

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Antipodes, vol. 21, no. 1, 2007 edited by Nicholas Birns & Southerly, vol. 67, no. 1-2, 2007 edited by David Brooks and Noel Rowe

by
November 2007, no. 296

This volume of Southerly, combining the first two issues for 2007, is a celebration of Elizabeth Webby’s contribution to Australian literature. Noel Rowe and Bernadette Brennan, the editors principally responsible for this issue, describe it as ‘a tribute to a brilliant career’. There are contributions from academic colleagues, generations of poets and writers of short fiction, and a number of ex-students, many of whom ‘have gone on to distinguished academic careers’.

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When David Brooks’s last volume of poetry, Walking to Clear Point, was published in 2005, it carried particular weight and fascination as his first volume of poetry in twenty-two years. It had been preceded in 1983 by The Cold Front, which, for some of us, was an influential book of ‘deep image’ poetry carved out of fault-lines and flaws, figuring honed poems of darkness and light. Now, after only a two-year gap, Brooks’s new collection of poems, Urban Elegies, has been published by the Island Press co-operative.

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The Shorter Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus by Gaius Valerius Catullus, translated by A.D. Hope

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July–August 2007, no. 293

Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.87–54 BC) may have died young, but his limited output (only 113 poems and some fragments have survived) has immortalised him as a writer of erotic and satiric verse and savage portraits of contemporaries, so frank sometimes that, until recent decades, editions of his work were customarily heavily expurgated. Innumerable poets through the ages have kept his flame burning. Ezra Pound peppers the opening cantos with references to Catullus. Ben Jonson’s famous ‘Come, my Celia’ is a version of Catullus 5.

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Southerly edited by David Brooks and Noel Rowe & Griffith Review 13 edited by Julianne Schultz (with Marni Cordell)

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December 2006–January 2007, no. 287

One of the best essays in the excellent spring issue of Griffith Review: The Next Big Thing, is a sustained attack by Griffith University academic Mark Bahnisch on the lazy clichés of ‘generation-journalism’. In an issue devoted to an examination of generational similarities and conflicts, Bahnisch calmly reminds us that not everyone living in the 1960s was a hell-raising radical, just as not all young people today fit the conservative–materialist stereotype the media is so fond of.

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Australian Literary Studies edited by Leigh Dale & Meanjin edited by Ian Britain

by
September 2005, no. 274

In his Structure of Complex Words (1951), William Empson counted fifty-two uses of the words ‘honest’ and ‘honesty’ in Othello. Nikki Gemmell, the publicity-shy cover star of the latest edition of Meanjin, manages to cram ten references to honesty (her own) into five lachrymose pages of her essay ‘The Identity Trap’, in which she explains that she refused to publish The Bride Stripped Bare (2003) under an assumed name because ‘a pseudonym is a lie’. How comforting it is to know that a writer of fiction should be possessed of such integrity, even if she does say so herself. Gemmell’s revelation does, however, constitute a severe blow to the reputations of George Orwell, Henry Handel Richardson and those lying Brontë sisters.

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At first, many of these forty-eight poems from two decades struck me as almost self-indulgent and mundane: short lyrics about family life, eating, drinking, dreaming of Valparaiso, lemons, the Molonglo River; though there was often an underside of premonition, discontent, and a stillness that made me think I hadn’t really understood. In the first group, ‘One Hundred Nights’ bothered me: ‘When will it end / this waking / while others sleep, / this herding out on the ghost fields? / the flesh / whispering / its impossible desires / the bones / murmuring their Kali mantra / love, emptiness / love, emptiness.’ However, on my next reading, some of the second group struck me with autumnal clarity. From ‘Brown Pigeon’: ‘eyes / plucked out, feathers / scattered, / maggots / when I turn it over / writhing in the black mess near the heart’, where the image of the dead bird is an iconic memento mori.

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I would now like to begin with a plea for small literary magazines. I now have a vested interest in their survival (well, one, in particular), but then, I always thought I did. Little magazines are essential to the vitality of Australian literary and political culture. They play an important role in nurturing new poets, critics, storytellers, and reviewers. In the current book-publishing climate, there are few other opportunities for publishing short stories, experimental fiction, or poetry. Small magazines instigate and foster cultural debate and present a diverse range of opinions. Many of the most important issues in Australian public life today were first raised and discussed in literary magazines, including the stolen generations and racial ‘genocide’, the perils of economic rationalism and globalisation, the politics of One Nation, and the implications of new media technologies.

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‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’

Can I begin like that? It’s risky, and contentious, and will probably come back at me. But it’s no less a stupid comment for all that. In my experience it is usually the ones who say it who are the ones who can’t.

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