After his novel The Fern Tattoo was shortlisted for this year's Miles Franklin Award, author David Brooks returns to poetry with the release of his new collection, The Balcony. The author is interviewed in "The Sydney Morning Herald".
"I have been struggling, trying to shift myself out of some very old and deeply lodged ideas about how I should write poems. I have been trying to find a new voice - I mean, I didn't know that I was trying to find a new voice, I didn't even know I was lodged in some old ideas of the poem - but now with what has happened with these poems, I at last know that I am speaking as myself."I also realise now that at last, after all this time, I am not afraid of speaking as myself. I realise that I hadn't before. But now I know that there is nothing else you can do: you come to a point in your life where you don't worry about how you seem to other people. That is where I am now. That really is a huge relief, getting over yourself. And I am getting over myself at last."
