The Other Side of Daylight: New and Selected Poems

Winner of the 2025 Prime Minister's Award for Poetry

A bottle of Romanee-Conti sells for $785,000, while bodies are dug by hand from earthquake rubble in Indonesia because the local government couldn't afford the earthmoving equipment to do so while people were still alive. Elephants are shot and skinned by poachers and remote Indigenous communities are shut down for want of infrastructural funding. And with tenderness and humility, a simple gift of peanuts to magpies, sheep and a tentative rat reframes the place of the human in the world.

David Brooks's longstanding concerns for justice and the relationship between human and non-human animals infuse and enliven his work. Wise, lyrical and timely, The Other Side of Daylight distils a long and honoured poetry career with a marvellous selection from his five previous volumes and The Peanut Vendor, a collection of forty-eight luminous new poems.