David Brooks
David Brooks, critic, novelist, short-story writer, animal rights activist as well as poet, taught Australian Literature, ran a writing program and co-edited Southerly at the University of Sydney. He has published six collections of poetry, the latest (The Peanut Vendor) included in his new and selected poems The Other Side of Daylight (UQP, 2024). He lives in the Blue Mountains with rescued sheep and advocates for kangaroos. The Sydney Morning Herald called his The Balcony (UQP, 2007) ‘an electrical experience’.
There are no lions to whelp in the street any more,and converselythe Council by-laws forbidthe keeping of the pigs and chickens, goats and cattlewhose prodigious multiplicationscould serve as an adequate metaphorand there are only so many burgeoning plantsyou can squeeze into a one-by-three-metre courtyardbut the possums have come back,
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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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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 burnin ... (read more)