On Friday night (12 September) I went along to the launch—a generous and smart and well tempered launch—of poet Robert Gray’s prose poem of a memoir, The Land I Came Through Last , at Lesley McKay’s Bookshop in Woollahra.

It was a mild night, and the city was beautiful, the moon nearing full, and I went later to dinner with Robert and Dee and Judy Beveridge and Stephen Edgar and some others of Robert’s friends in Kings Cross, thinking to myself, how can it be that I come to be sitting at this table with Robert Gray, who was my favourite poet when I was learning twenty something years ago what poetry was, and later I walked back along Darlinghurst Road and Oxford Street to where I was staying (The Hughenden in Queen Street); but before I got there, and after I stopped to light the cigarette of a girl with sage eyes, I went into Ariel Bookshop and found David Brooks’s recent collection of love poems, The Balcony (UQP), and I bought it and carried it back to the hotel.

I read most of the poems later, and quite late it got, on the balcony of my room upstairs. The poems are so tender and smart and vulnerable and sexy, and so elegantly made, I regretted only that I was alone.

Fantastic work, David. Everyone should go and buy a copy and read the poems to their lover. If you don’t have a lover, you should get one. Or get a balcony and read the poems out loud to the night, and you’ll have one soon. Or a cold.