Among the highlights in this issue are B.R. Dionysius’s poems about extinct birds. In ‘Night Parrot’ we read: ‘We’re the kind of bird that gets poets going, / Our cult status assured, we’re the half-mythical, / Anti-institutional un-parrot like animal, night- / Addicted, we need our Southern Cross fix like / Your kind need to argue existence, ours mainly.’ Dorothy Porter (whose third book was called The Night Parrot) meditates with typical clarity and profundity in ‘Neanderthals’ on what we should have learned from our ancestors about death: ‘we disturbed them / with their hands ochre-red / preparing their dead // … we did dreadful things / we learnt nothing from them.’ James Bradley’s ‘The Element of Need’ is an unsettling Robert Drewe-like account of male sexual violence in tame suburban Adelaide.

In my favourite piece in this edition, ‘Napoleonic Fictions,’ Antoni Jach offers portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte and his associates, and executes them with style and irony: ‘He gains his power by embracing Thanatos and is always naively surprised when he discovers he is the one who ends up still alive on a mountain of warm blood and fraying limbs. He is convinced a lucky star is watching over him … The doubts of the writer assail him in the early hours of the morning: Which face to put on? Which mask to wear today? Who am I when I am asleep? … Spoken like a true novelist! Worthy of a Borges!’ Jach’s piece is worthy of Borges, and HEAT is likewise commendable.