A poem is a place where you can bring things together, you don't have to know why. The mad and the bad, the gentle and the dead, tooth-ache and heart-ache and the ache and quandary of history. We are all creatures trembling under the sun of witness (or is it rain?); some of us, for reasons it would be hard to explain, trying to catch the strange, sad music of it, on the days we can hear it, before it disappears again.

Opening the house of his life and extending naturally the striking love poetry of his last volume, The Balcony, Brooks' arrestingly confessional poems range in scale from observations of the smallest creatures underfoot – stepped over, left in peace – to acknowledgments both of the smallness of human endeavour and the catastrophic effects of our custodianship. Vital in all senses, these are poems through which to view the world afresh.