This is an astonishing first collection of poetry from David Herkt. These poems burn with the contemporary passions of sex, death and love. The modernity of Herkt’s voice is brilliantly counterpointed by poems that utilise the classical past and European history, but perhaps the most crucial subject of these poems is the human rites of desire and grief in a time of plague. The opening series of poems, ‘Satires’, has been described as the greatest gay sequence to have been written in Australasia. The shock and pleasure of these poems reveal just how timid most modern writing has become.