Dear Editor,

‘Who reads it?’ asks Gerard Windsor of HEAT (ABR, June 1999) and admits he no longer does. In fact, he confesses, he never reads stories or essays by writers who don’t have a book to their name. What a strange and limiting conceit! But as for who reads HEAT, well, I for one do – every issue, from cover to cover. And there must be more like me; people who read for enjoyment, who read for reasons other than job or duty, who read to please themselves.

I like HEAT. It may be a mélange, but there are few duds in the mix, and patterns and themes can often be glimpsed in the juxtapositioning of writers and text, poems and visuals, allowing pieces to resonate and spark off one another. This is a hallmark of HEAT and evidence of Indyk’s skill as an editor. HEAT is challenging, stimulating, and thought provoking. Few would like everything with equal fervour, and personally I admit that pieces have lost me or left me puzzled. But never bored.

There are now 10,000 books written about Auschwitz. About the Holocaust there must be many more tens of thousands. Lily Brett is one of the great readers and collectors of these books. Her novels and poems are awash with Holocaust details and with an obsessive sense of responsibility for this impossible knowledge. Impossible because the horrific details cannot be held in the mind for long. In Too Many Men, the Holocaust stories do not come with the poised and philosophical moral gravity of an Inga Clendinnen, nor with the outrageous sensationalism of a Darville but with a doggedness and astonishment that are finally powerfully effective.

Too Many Men might be the novel Lily Brett has been trying to write all these years as she produced her earlier three smaller, less ambitious novels. From the outset it promises to be a weighty reprise on the previous novels. I was disappointed at first for the impression was that I had stepped right back into Just Like That (1994), a novel I thought had lacked the brittle edginess of her first two. Long before the end, though, this book won me over.

Alan Gould is not noted for being a poet of light verse, but with this volume he has achieved what brewers of light beer aim for strength without the hangover. The blurb rightly highlights Gould’s technique and lyrical gifts, and his acute vision of absurdity is present in abundance. Perhaps Gould has become the Heinrich Heine of Canberra, charting his city of decadence, with its down-and-outs, retired Army Majors, cheap opiates and X-rated entertainments, its dandified lobbyists, ‘Tsarevnas-on-the-dole’ and divorcees desperate for dalliance. Anne Langridge’s illustrations add to the book’s cabaret atmosphere, though you wouldn’t say Gould was paying homage to Berlin’s in the 1930s, with its Dada and expressionist camp.

For a committed free-verser like myself, Gould’s grasp of traditional verse form is dazzling – form as a ludic performance, a virtuoso doing a Paganini. Perhaps this is a ludicrous book for all that, and occasionally, an over-use of iambic pentameters sounds wrong, as in poems inspired by Jazz; I prefer the more vernacular breath of the Black American poet Komunyakaa, or the New Yorker Kleinzahler. What Gould has though, is the knowledge of Old and Middle English rhyme schemes, and its alliteration and sprezzatura sound effects: ‘Bees are pestering sparaxis’ for example. Metaphorical inventions abound. In one poem, the moon is compared to a topaz, a briolette, a ‘little gizmo’ earring and a ‘whitefaced, puffy, balding bloke’.

Since the publication in 1995 of her first collection, Michelangelo’s Prisoners, Jennifer Harrison has continued to impress readers and to broaden her repertoire. Her fourth collection in as many years, the intimately entitled Dear B, consolidates her reputation and demonstrates sufficient difference and intensity to satisfy admirers of this sensitive, likeable poet.