Apocalypse Jazz

David E. Kemp is chair of the Drama Department at Queen’s University
and author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Maggie Helwig is one of Canada’s most interesting young poets. In this
book, she channels her extensive literary talents into lively,
sophisticated, irreverent (but deeply serious) essays in which she
explores what is happening to the human imagination as we approach the
new millennium.

Helwig sees culture (high and low) and the insanity of politics as part
of a desperate struggle for human enlightenment and understanding. Her
analysis of the apocalypse is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of
this startling volume. For Helwig, the apocalypse is more than a big
bang that finishes things off; it is also an unveiling, a revelation.
Rather than sit and wait for the end, her impulse is to examine the
context in which that end may come about. To do so she enlists subjects
as disparate as pop culture, classical music, the nuclear nightmare,
poetry, dance, literary criticism, anorexia, Shakespeare, and religion.

In the course of her always penetrating analysis, Helwig shows an
intimacy with such icons as Prince, Bob Dylan, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Glenn
Gould, Northrop Frye, and Vaslav Nijinsky. This remarkable book is
virtually impossible to put down.