The Balcony is a stunning collection by one of Australia’s quiet masters of poetry (Robert Adamson said of Brooks’ previous collection, Urban Elegies, that it contained some of ‘the best and most uplifting poetry that I have experienced in years’), The Balcony is a volume of one hundred love poems in the tradition of Pablo Neruda’s The Captain’s Verses or Jacques Prevert’s Paroles, but on closer acquaintance becomes so much more. This poetry is by turns erotic, visceral, political, satirical, philosophical and confessional - often all of these at the same time - and is always deeply and unabashedly sensual and lyrical, in a manner that has led early readers, pre-publication, to suggest that it marks the arrival of a powerful new style in this country’s writing.