Few people ever remark about a new book of poems, "It's a real page-turner, I couldn't put it down." No doubt this says a great deal about contemporary reading preferences. (Poetry is the poor sister of the written arts, the one who sweeps up the cinders while fiction and non-fiction are off at the ball schmoozing with the prince, or, in Canadian terms, off in Toronto schmoozing with the man who runs HarbourFront). But it also says much about contemporary poets, a depressing number of whom, wounded by the seeming irrelevancy of their chosen genre, either give up on craft and tradition in favour of "topical" content and rock-star poses, or abandon poetry altogether, deeming it a dead form.
By way of contrast, the highest praise I can offer David Helwig is to recognize his obvious belief in poetry as a vital form that looks beyond the superficial preoccupations of the moment, to locate and explore more lasting and meaningful subjects.
A Random Gospel, his first collection in four years, is a real page-turner, eclectic in content, unapologetically adult in tone, and consciously poetic in style without being self-consciously poetic. (There is a difference: where Shakespeare writes "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action," a self-conscious modern poet is more apt to detail his or her latest sexual escapade in purple, chopped-up prose.) If you appreciate a poetry that directly addresses the fundamental themes that truly haunt us (how we deal with the loss and absence of love, for example, or the role faith and wonder play in enriching our lives and preserving our humanity), you'll find A Random Gospel hard to put down. Helwig has something of value to say, and the manner of his expression, serious, contemplative, but also playful and unpredictable, makes reading his new book an intimate and compelling experience.
Due to his interest in silence and light, in angels and a kind of spiritual awe (Christian in content, but fortunately undogmatic), some might accuse Helwig of being more concerned with ephemeral states of consciousness and high culture than with the actual world most of us inhabit. He writes poems based on biblical events (the immaculate conception in "A Messenger") and biblical verses (the long title-poem is broken into fifteen sections, each inspired by a verse taken at random from the Christian gospels), on famous paintings, on other poets (included are translations of Akhmatova, a poem about Thomas Hardy, and an elegy for Helwig's friend Tom Marshall), and a long poem entitled, "A Short History of Black-and-White Photography".
This is a reflective book, a meditation on the nature of being, on how we come to terms with our place in this often painful and confusing world. Helwig's fascination with an ultimate meaning beyond our own is the basis of his poetics, as in section 6 of "A Messenger":

Rilke was not the only poet fascinated by angels; it
is perhaps
an inevitable part of the poet's situation that he is
constantly
on the watch for messengers, that he suspects that the
fringes
of the world unravel into silence and light.

To Helwig's credit, his journey to the "fringes of the world" rarely bogs down in abstraction or cliché (the use of angels in contemporary poetry often signals a limp spirituality). Indeed, the last section of "A Messenger" surprisingly summarizes Savonarola's view of the Virgin:

Mary was poor and humble
and wore flour sacks.
Otherwise, God
would not have fancied her.

And she wasn't pretty,
but fat, and drowned in bad
diseases of the skin.

No-one has the right
to be beautiful.
It denies the sad depth
of the holy soul.

Helwig closes this long opening poem by describing Savonarola's words as "the gospel/of a new and absolute winter." In this one line, he expresses his belief in beauty as a potent force and his awareness of the world as a threat to the beautiful.
From here, he reveals how skillfully he has put his poems together. "An Old Story", the book's second poem, and one of its most successful, is a moving biography of the woman he loves, from her childhood to her current serious illness. Savonarola's absolute winter has arrived, and the effect is twofold: we are brought face-to-face with the hard facts of so-called reality, with the threat of loss and absent love, and we begin to feel the weight of the poet's struggle to remain life-affirming. The intimate feel of the collection deepens from this point on, though the poems are not always so personal; the intimacy stems from our realization that Helwig continually makes the hard choice right before our eyes. He knows about loss, meditates on it, and searches for ways to secure a kind of permanence:

Now it is evening, sky growing dark
as it must, and among the millions
who live on this earth
and might be thought about,
I am thinking of you. ("An Old Story: 10")

Loneliness and suffering, but always with an essential faith in some sort of redemption. Without a doubt, these states and the hope they engender explain Helwig's interest in the writings of Anna Akhmatova, who lost virtually everything a person can lose except her belief in poetry as a way to stave off utter despair. He translates Akhmatova's "Requiem", several poems dealing with her experiences during the Yezhov purges, and while I cannot assess Helwig's fidelity to the original poems in Russian, his translations are powerful and well-crafted (his adherence to rhyme-schemes is especially admirable). Here's a brief example:

The mountains bow themselves before this
sorrow.
No movements in the great river.
Bolts and bars: the prisons are very thorough.
Inside, prisoners buried inside their narrow
cells. And a deathly shiver.
For someone, somewhere, there's a cooling breeze,
sunset luxuriant and sweet. ("Dedication")

In "A Short History of Black-and-White Photography", the long poem that follows the translations, Helwig changes pace yet again, and the result is a wonderful series of short monologues and biographies of the pioneers and celebrities of the photography world, from M. Nicéphore Niepce and his "apparatus" in the early nineteenth century to the shocking oeuvre of Diane Arbus in the twentieth.
But while Helwig seems to be shifting ground, he is really only digging in, holding fast to his themes of loss and human aspiration, looking even closer at the possible worlds between empirical reality and the imagination. What a masterful stroke it is to follow up his translations of Akhmatova with these lines from "Invention": "The universe demanded it. It was/the one cure for loss. Until now/kissed mouths could be forgotten." We have been shown the disease, and now we have the possible cure. And because Helwig so clearly enjoys himself entering into the minds of these photographers, the poetic journey is a delight for the reader. Just consider the opening of "Man Ray", for example:

You can't be anyone until
you invent your name. Dis-
continuity is muse
of the all-new.
Dada kills daddy dead.

Nothing is so much fun
as girls without clothes.
Splash them with buckets
of cheap light. Never stop
looking for laughs.

Or the opening of "Bill Brandt": "Don't expect charm. I'm not/that kind of Englishman." My knowledge of photography is limited, but these short pieces are so quirky and alive that I am completely drawn in; Helwig's history seems accurate, which is the glue that holds together any strong poem.
The rest of A Random Gospel offers many delights, including a few poems set in England, especially "Hardy: April 1994" and a five-part companion piece, "Five Days," in which Helwig, in true Hardy fashion, recounts his feelings as he walks through the countryside. There is a gentle and wise sensibility behind these poems, and a real sense of craft that affords them a natural, flowing rhythm; when Helwig mentions the rain, we can almost hear it falling.
Similarly, many of the sections in the title-poem provide lovely lyrical touches and inspired moments, as Helwig explores the ramifications of various biblical verses. Numbers 12 and 14 are two of the most entertaining, especially 14, with its list of what fills the good heart: "hand-made furniture/and woven cloth, gardening tools//jambalaya, gnocchi, peaches/berries, the collected/poems of Andrew Marvell/and a box of love-letters."
The book is not flawless. At times, the aphoristic quality of the poems becomes wearying. Lines such as "Only the loved can betray," and "all love is a vastness," along with several references to the soul, veer dangerously close to abstraction, and sound lame when placed against the poet's more focused writing.
As well, Helwig's reliance on adjectives to paint a scene and intensify emotion is occasionally overdone, as in these lines from "Mystic Nativity": "I hear/the slender excited drawn metal/of bird calls, and overhead/the passing roar and disappearing/scream of the long bright planes." Such adjectival clutter goes against the grain of his usual clarity.
Finally, "Pisanello: St. George & the Princess", one of the long poems, depends too heavily on its reference; that is, what Helwig does poetically with the painting is not interesting enough to merit the attempt. In any case, this poem, placed between the long love-poem and the Russian translations, interrupts the powerful flow of Helwig's themes, weakening the link between his pain and Akhmatova's.
A Random Gospel could have had better production values. Pages appear twice, and in the wrong order. Canadian publishing may be in dire straits these days, but that is no excuse. Helwig has had a long relationship with Oberon, and his work deserves to be treated with the utmost attention to detail.
His publisher's failings cannot upstage his poems, however; they are the well-crafted products of a sensitive and energetic mind. With nearly every turn of the page, the reader comes across another delightful and felicitous line, another reason to share the poet's ultimate faith in our ability to exist with joy at the near boundaries of silence and light. It is only fitting to let Helwig's gracefully hopeful language close out this review:

The heart will not beat forever;
hold on tight to what you have known,
shared food, shared rooms, a red lipstick,
a toothbrush, long black hairs, soft down
beside the ear, the nakedness
under a long white gown, the shape
of small bones, the secret beauty
of uneventful private hours among
the things of a dying season. ("Five Days: 3")

 Tim Bowling is a poet from Ladner, B.C., who lives in Edmonton. His latest book is Low Water Slack (Nightwood).