Eating Glass

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

This book is as compelling as its title, poetry of craft and inspiration
that fuses the world of the early church with the modern industrial
apocalypse. With Christs and Kerouacs in the background, Helwig’s
struggling characters walk the urban streets of centuries, transported
by visions drawn from the air or sprung from the common dirt. Her
presence is as immediate at the fall of Byzantium (“The emperor is
bent upon a field of gold and where / they tore his eyes out there are
rubies”), or at the sight of a Ferris wheel in the Midwest
(“cathedrals breaking out of pastries / and the like, the fast wheel /
of the heart’s blood praying and metal music”), as it is foraging
through the subway or watching the red lights of a computer, microchips
whispering “intimate suggestions.”

But despite the terrors of Los Angeles burning, Sarajevo bombarded, and
the up-close-and-personal horror of the Montreal massacre, despair is
not her answer. Through faith lies hope, a personal salvation through
the simple notion that we are “real,” that “we paint our colours
into the air / we do exist there.” And that the private pleasure of
saying one’s love’s name in the morning can be a ritual as powerful
as a Hail Mary. Small wonder that, with the cadences of prayers, music
informs her work: brash, holding back nothing, she punches her
rhythms—first with a jazzy syncopation, next with a Gregorian
chant—but never misses a beat. Her experimental presentation includes
concrete graffiti as illustrations intertwined with her poetry. This is
a rare worldview that deserves a second look.