Clifford Brooks was born in Athens, Georgia and currently lives in northwest Georgia. His first poetry collection, The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, nominated for a Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry, was re-issued by Kudzu Leaf Press in August 2018. His second full-length poetry volume, Athena Departs: Gospel of a Man Apart, as well as a limited-edition poetry chapbook, Exiles of Eden, were published by Kudzu Leaf Press in 2017. Clifford is the founder of The Southern Collective Experience, a cooperative of writers, musicians and visual artists, which publishes the journal The Blue Mountain Review and hosts the radio show Dante’s Old South. He is on the faculty of The Company of Writers, which offers writers workshops as well as editing and manuscript review services.

Books by Clifford Brooks:

Other poems on the web by Clifford Brooks:
Three poems
Three poems

About The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics :

"Clifford Brooks writes a passionate, eloquent poetry, as wide-ranging as the models he sometimes invokes, including the blues and the epics."
—Robert Pinsky

"From Etta James to Baudelaire, Yeats to Faulkner to the Beats, Miles Davis to Monet, from L.A. to Tupelo to Savannah, it's a wild ride and one that's sure to stick with you long after daring to jump in."
—Chad Prevost

" In the first two sections of The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Brooks explores the everyday in language that's at once lyrical and lively. There is nothing of the academic in lines like 'Kerouac drank double time / because he was lumped in with junkie friends' or "little towns don't wear time well," but everything of the real. In the startlingly brilliant third section, "The Gateman's Hymn of Ignoracium," Brooks jumps from the quotidian to the mythic. He takes on the same subject matter as Dante and Milton, the Great War in Heaven and its eternal aftermath. In 'Gatesman's Hymn,' the narrator is a noncombatant-an angel who didn't take sides in Lucifer's Revolt and thus, as a neutral, sorts out the damned and fits them to apt punishment. In 'Soldiers of the Gateman,' we see his emissaries, demons from cultures as diverse as the Persian Zoroastrians and the Algonkians. The section ends with the chilling line: 'All your sins are remembered.' Brooks clearly writes his heart out in every line on every page."
—Terence Hawkins