The Year One

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

David Helwig is a gifted and prolific poet whose long career has not
attracted the attention one might expect, considering that he has
published at least 36 books, excluding anthologies. His sumptuous new
volume from Gaspereau shows his usual care and engagement with life. The
work falls into 12 sections, one for each month of the year. They
contain reflections on literature, nature, friendship—whatever enters
the reflective poet’s ken from memory or observation. The dominant
mode is a long line, but three sections are written in brief lines. The
mood is autumnal but not defeated. The one limitation of the poems is
their evenness of tone, but there are precedents for such reflective
poetry at least as far back as William Cowper. As Helwig says in Section
10, “it’s all there in poems / as if life / didn’t abandon us at
all.” These are poems that in a reciprocal courtesy don’t abandon
life either.