Susan Helwig's first collection  starts with the vigour and probing of 
youth and ends with the lassitude of middle age.  Part 1, "The Garden", is 
about making poetry and other art forms. "First and Best Morning" is 
presented as unpunctuated run-on prose cluttered with ampersands, a 
formlessness that serves as a metaphor for the subject -- green youth. Like
an adolescent raising her voice at the end of every statement, Helwig 
occasionally uses the interrogative mode -- "seeing you, is it like angels 
/ who sing to those who never run out of hope?" ("Breakfast at the 
Midcity") 

Part II, "Butter, No Butter," reveals the poet's parents. Helwig co-opts 
the persona of Leo Montag and the story-telling mode of Ursula Hegi in 
Stones from the Sea (1997) to penetrate the compassionate psyche of 
her father. Her father's death gives her greater access to her mother.  Her
narrative techniques range from the Magic Realism  of "The Wesch Girls" to 
the allusive  threnody of "Remains of the Night." In the latter poem the 
reader will recognize the theme of perceived duty to others opposed to 
one's duty to oneself -- so central to Ishiguro's novel The Remains of 
the Day.

A saccharine reflection on singing for loved ones, the poem "In Concert" 
contains the title of the book, and of  Part III. It is placed, not 
coincidentally, in the midst of a catalogue of  'loved ones.'  

Part IV, "So Far From Home," travels through Europe, with recollections of 
Ontario.  The best poems contain narrative and descriptive content as 
framework for the more esoteric musings. The "Driver," as secular 
Sandman,  conducts the poet to idyllic dreamlands in Ontario and through 
wartime nightmares in Amsterdam. "By Train through Germany" discloses, in a
succession of umsteigens (train changes), the traveler's literary 
and musical aesthetic, her religious and historical proclivities, her 
libido and in the end her homesickness. Significantly less gripping are 
transcriptions of streams of haphazard consciousness.

The naughty bits are mostly in Part V, "Big Brass Bed." In Part VI, 
"Conservatory," Helwig announces, "I have not used all of my palette." She 
attempts with varying success to correct that omission in a dozen short 
poems.

"Perhaps the way I'm stirring the ingredients together  /  is mine alone," 
she says, in the first poem of the collection. Her buttermilk pie is always
original, often profound. Catch the Sweet is a palatable dish.
    ERS

	Liliane Welch opens Unlearning Ice  with contemplations on 
everyday objects, ascribing to them an awareness of their essential roles 
in our lives. She allows commonplaces to reveal the moment of their being, 
their subtle consequence. In "Entering the House," the reader is enjoined 
to recognize the kind of company we keep with our domestic environment. But
as we are often reminded, this poet has entered not just a new house, but a
new homeland. "What of the outsider," she asks,"who carries questions / and
secret voices inside?" ("Congregation")
	"Photo Journeys" proposes that the silent land of  New Brunswick 
photographer Thaddeus Holownia "hungers for language." In her notes Welch 
confides that many of the poems in the first half of Unlearning Ice 
"are part of an ongoing dialogue" with the images captured by Holownia. She
fastens to "these empty Maritimes" her own art, supplanting earlier 
testaments of humankind. "August dusk awash" invokes the spirit of Hesiod, 
the Greek mythologist, to assist in the writing of "the old stories." 
	A second theme that pervades this volume is the poet's recognition 
of the passage of life. In "Around Thanksgiving" a browning landscape, 
swift wolves and angry clouds evoke the contemplation of approaching death,
although that end is not yet in sight. She maintains her liveliness most 
emphatically in the following poem, "October Twentieth, my life." She faces
the sun.
	"At sixty-two" she expresses a desire to relive her life as a 
musician or a sculptor, but not "as a scholar, mending fences on low 
ground," a depressing image for her present academic calling. Of course, if
she hadn't been a scholar we would have missed her allusions to Hesiod, and
Baudelaire, and Caravaggio.
	"Radiant Hush," the second division of the book, takes the reader 
into the cover painting by Alex Colville, and on into the works and lives 
of other artists as well -- Rodin, for example, in "When we glimpse them, 
delight."  The subject, by that sculptor, is an unfinished work , "The 
Eternal Idol," which, for a better appreciation of the poem, may be seen on
the Internet at http
://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/rodin/rodin_eternal1.jpg.. 
	Welch's first interpretation of the female figure, "leaning back in
reverie, to accept his kiss," conforms to Rodin's original title of the 
work, The Host.  But the "torso-language" creates an impression of the 
male's dependence and worship. Furthermore, his figure is incomplete, 
"shouldering out of marble" as Welch suggests, and leaving, as does the 
poem, the nature of consummated love an unanswered question: Is love "a 
mountain's radiance, stirring in an eternal idol's hands?" In a later poem 
("Saint Augustine") Welch affirms that "mountains first framed human 
longing."
	A question arises of the legitimacy of a poem inspired by an 
obscure work of art, or as we shall see later in this collection, an 
obscure artist. A poet's answer is that a subject, however uncelebrated or 
tenebrous, may demand that a poem be written. Publishing for others to read
is an after-thought. The essential feature of such a poem is that it shall 
contain a universal truth, or at least a universal question -- in this case
concerning the nature of love.
	When we reach the poem "Thirst" we are into the midwinter of the 
volume's ostensible time-line, and Welch, longing for her other world, 
emerges as a mistress of metonymy: "We sip warm hillsides, lavender smells,
the delight of talk..."  European wine drunk in New Brunswick is a figure 
for trans-Atlantic landscapes, smells, conversations and old friends, 
"their taste leaving us thirsty once more." It seems we must guard our 
distance, for a sip of great wine leaves us to bear the aftertaste.
	Part 3, "Unlocked Melody," begins with poems about loss and death, 
in which the event is sadder for those who remain behind than for the 
deceased, who "embrace the journey" ("Preludes") or linger nearby to "read 
our thoughts" ("They"). These thoughts are presented at the end of this 
section. Ice imagery becomes depressingly and deliberately more frequent. 
Canadians have "learned" ice, and we must unlearn it for an esthetic 
experience. Poetry is a way toward this unlearning, a synthesis of music 
and imagery.
	Welch's Canada is much as Voltaire described it, "quelques arpents 
de neige." Her emancipation (in "Thoughts") resembles a personal 
gotterdammerung. She joins her Valkyrian twilight visitors, and we 
find her back in Europe for the summer (part 4).
	Giovanni Segantini was an Italian painter who lived 1858-1899. See 
http://www.segantini
-museum.ch/htmls/index2.htm for the subject of "At the Segantini Museum
in St. Moritz."  "Quick Flights" pertains to Czanne's "Madame Czanne 
au fauteuil jaune," to be found at http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/portraits/m
me/cezanne.mme-yellowchair.jpg. "Caravaggio's Medusa" (p79) maybe seen 
at http://www.k
fki.hu/~arthp/html/c/caravagg/03/index.html. 
	Whether or not the reader is prepared to open those sites for the 
visual dimension, the three poems might be placed on their own as a 
tryptich on the apotheosis of women through submission -- to necessity, to 
matrimony and to misogyny. Welch attended "Caravaggio - the light in 
Lombard painting," an exhibition at the Carrara Academy in Bergamo, Italy, 
in the early summer of 2000. She empathizes with Caravaggio's women, 
Judith, Ursula, Salome, who "open a hunger tempered by composure, bent 
heads," and particularly Medusa, who was forced to realize the failure of 
her petrifying glance. 
	Can every poet draw nourishment from any painter's art?  "How 
jolting it was not to be a saint," says Welch, in shock at being 
ineligible, as an unbeliever, to profit from the "book of hours," the 
church interior that Ruskin called the poor man's Bible. She also 
understands the artist's anguish, whether poet or painter. Vincent van Gogh
once wrote from the painter's point of view, to his brother Theo, "Poetry 
is more formidable than painting." I think Welch knows what he meant by 
"formidable," in "Painter at Home." The atelier is "the place
for bending thought in pilgrimage to un-named things."
	Unlearning Ice  ends far from the winters of the Tantramar. 
It is July near the Swiss-Italian border, half-way between Saint Moritz and
Lake Como. Part III of "In the Val Bregaglia"  alludes to Rainer Maria 
Rilke's self-composed epitaph: "Rose, O pure contradiction, desire to be no
one's sleep beneath so many lids." While in Paris, Rilke developed a 
lyricism influenced by the visual arts.  Welch is evidently Rilke's 
disciple in this regard. 
	She reflects at last on a youth lost but not regretted, and an 
auspicious future. We may  anticipate from Liliane Welch a further triumph 
of art over winter.
    ERS

	Marianne Bluger begins by sitting the reader "on prickly plush" in 
the audience of an imminent spectacular, and advises, "Just watch us." She 
generously includes everyone in the promised performance, but scissor, 
paper, woman  is all Bluger. Here are the reflections of a woman who 
has vanquished outrageous fortune through faith, love and poetry. (Now 
abide these three.) Here are hard truths, passionately and compassionately 
urged.

	The first of four sections, "Night Station," contains sketches full
of ominous overtones and   disasters both apprehended and realized. They 
include the title poem of the book, which presents the Woman-become-stone, 
enveloped in her oppressor's lies, who silences for a time her own 
scissor-tongue. 

	A woman is not a stone, and life is not a children's game. The 
words "scissor, paper, woman" mark the progress of an autobiography. The 
white sheet where the girl lies splayed like an X becomes the paper on 
which the woman has written her deliverance.

	In Part 2, "Nude with Scar," Marianne presents snapshots of city 
life, moments of contemplation between happenings, like black-and-white 
photos at an exhibition.  Here also we find for the first time, in the 
title poem of the section, a stainless steel hospital bed, an image to 
recur again (see "In Albion Daylight".) "Steel" in Marianne's 
vocabulary is always unquestionable, as in the key to a car in winter 
("What Happened to the Body Then") or to an unwelcoming house 
("Porchlight".) 

	In this extremity "she glimpsed that truth / which always was / the
dire joy of the Greeks" -- an echo of Theodore Roethke's "last pure stretch
of joy, / the dire dimension of a final thing." ("The Tree, the Bird", 
1964).

	The section ends with "The Sky a Salmon River", addressed to her 
son going fishing, alone. Poetry is also a dangerous solo venture --"this 
wilful journey / sole adventure and only trek /down a blind trail to 
interior black." She evokes Merwin, Atwood and Purdy as kindred spirits 
concerned with the mythology of wilderness.

	In "The Red Rim", title poem of the third part, a girl caught in 
the undertow experiences a devolutionary epiphany before regaining the 
beach -- the near-death experience once more.  Marianne returns to the 
theme again and again in the existential poems of the last section.  In her
strong poem, "In Albion Daylight," she has become "the one who 
survived her own death / and it was nothing."

	What is the source of her endurance, her cogency, her vision? The 
cryptic answer is earlier in the same poem:
	"I would not nor you
	survive the failure of love."

    ERS