One Building in the Earth: New and Selected Poems

Lydia Forssander-Song is a sessional instructor in the English
Department at Trinity Western University.

For this volume, Maggie Helwig has gathered poems representative of her
entire poetic career to date. Approximately half of the collection
consists of poems published in her earlier works, Because the Gunman
(1987), Eden (1987), Talking Prophet Blues (1989), Graffiti for J.J.
Harper (1991), Eating Glass (1994), and City on Wednesday (1996). Absent
from this volume are selections from her first two poetry books, Walking
Through Fire (1981) and Tongues of Men and Angels (1985). Her new poems
continue to demonstrate her musical ear through their smooth cadences
and superb sense of rhythm, coupled with her stark imagery and
soul-searching themes.

Helwig’s poetry employs striking colours (red, blue, gold, white,
orange, yellow, green, black, and silver) to paint a picture of mostly
current urban realities. Her strong sense of social activism (notably
with regard to East Timor) is clearly evident. Although the poems are
determinedly grounded in the present, intertwining themes of memory and
desire lend them poignance and transcendence. Saints and winged
creatures (birds, angels, and seraphs) inhabit these poems.

Above all, through prayers and blessings attenuated by grace and mercy,
Helwig’s speakers both in body and in spirit search for God and for
salvation with a tenuous sense of faith: “this faith / that nothing
which has been loved can wholly die / that the heart creates itself
daily, and / that our tatters and art, our silk and garbage, / lead us
… to this small place of light … For all our pains and petty sins /
we are a new creation in this light; this moment / the only thing I know
in this world / that is something like faith. You sleep beside me. / We
are in another country.” The collection ends with the line “Faith is
asleep in our arms like the weight of the sun.”