Hofmann’s reflections on the art of translation find an interesting corollary in Kate Lilley’s essay on American poet Susan Howe’s The Midnight (2003), where she discusses, among other things, the familial-intertextual and almost objet trouvé aspects of Howe’s poetry. Like the odd ‘remove’ of the act of translation (at once faithful and yet fundamentally interpretative), Howe’s work often feels somewhat distant, even at its most intimate, and Lilley notes the tension between Howe’s ability to suspend readers on the surface and then draw them ‘into the  darkness by the work of active reading’.  Apart from a fleeting, and slightly uncomfortable and incorrect, allusion to Walter Benjamin, Lilley’s essay is an excellent interrogation of  this most intimidating and fascinating of poets.

Two other enjoyable moments: Saskia Beudel’s reflections on landscape through the prism of family, ‘City of Skies’, and Josiane Behmoiras’s critical travelogue of her trek to meet theorist Paul Virilio, ‘A Flight of Fancy’. In both instances, what could have become ugly – the indulgent first-person voice so popular in the tertiary creative writing environment – ends up as a graceful discussion that is unafraid of critical theory and moves effortlessly between personal rumination and more abstract thought. More of this, and less of the hand-wringing that characterises much of the fiction in Heat 21, would be welcome.