"the language of the waterway / the name / the train's route through
bliss / to" When the poet and novelist David Helwig - a recipient of the
Matt Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement and a member of the Order of
Canada - died in October 2018, he left behind a substantial catalogue of
unpublished work. A House in Memory, a selection of Helwig's last poems,
was assembled by his daughter, Maggie. It shows an author still at the
height of his powers, creating work in complex formal structures,
contemplating mortality, memory, and the landscape of his adopted home
of Prince Edward Island, and paying tribute to his literary
predecessors. The collection also includes unpublished poems from
earlier in Helwig's career. Ranging widely through time, space, and
literary tradition, A House in Memory features some deeply personal
poems. As Maggie Helwig says of her father, "he could not cease to be a
poet as long as he had breath in this world.