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Debut collections by poets Susan Helwig and Christine Wiesenthal reveal their mastery of craft and mature sensibilities. Both poets are excavators of past and present: they mine the uncertain terrain of childhood and youth, the hazardous surfaces of adult experience. Both see the wide world and record their knowledge of its brutality. They write of paternal betrayal with the same unsettling frankness they bring to day-to-day events.

In poems that cover a range of subject and geography, Susan Helwig writes in the wry voice of a seasoned observer. She begins in the present - on Toronto's Danforth Avenue where grocery stores sell enticing foods from Europe - and moves back in memory to her grandmother's buttermilk pie, "bake it slowly / so important / just the right amount of nutmeg / for success" (13). The tension between present and past is felt across the volume as lived experience leads to recollection that soon informs and shapes the present moment. For Helwig, time and experience are fluid and she eschews the potential for poetry - for all art, in fact - to memorialize. Her poems resonate with the pull of the past, its press on the present.

The prose poem "First & Best Morning," recalls "the world washed clean like it will never be again wet with / promise" (14) when the speaker first ventured out from her farm to sell a calf at market. The poem celebrates an innocence shared between speaker and calf who are both young and untouched by hardship. The delightful narcissism of the child is evoked in another prose poem in which the speaker asserts that her mother, newly pregnant with a boy, is "going to trade me . . . for a new / oil cloth to put on the kitchen table" (25). At times, however, memories of childhood remain elusive. Try as she might, the speaker of "Lessons" cannot remember skating with her father: "surely he took me up in fatherly embrace, carried me off the ice when I cried" (29). Regret for lost memories and missed opportunities characterizes poems that understand childhood and youth as the volatile seedbed for adulthood.

For Helwig, love always is unpredictable, an uncertain anodyne to the vagaries of adult life. Determined to end years of "sorrow" (61), a father commits suicide - "pumped the rifle and fired" (36) - and his daughter seeks comfort in relationships with women and men alike. Several celebratory poems chart a female erotic of self love and lesbian love. As lovers, men usually are passive and uninteresting. At their most threatening, they become predatory: "In five minutes the phone will start to ring / it will ring and ring / . . . / he will try to find you" (80). Although a benign spouse lurks in the shadows of several poems, love generally is unredemptive and the offerings of humans, imperfect by nature, are flawed: mother "natters all day into my ear / about my lack of children, my thrift, my old age" (96).

Solace is available, however, in the sensual pleasures provided by food, language, and music. The nurturing properties of simple food are praised in a number of poems. Invariably, the preparation of food is a sign of devotion: a gift of raspberry jam, "the rolling boil of full-blown fruit" (70), from one lover to another; or "French toast washed with butter and syrup / somebody in the kitchen knows what I need" (16). The offering of food soothes and unites human beings. Language, too, is a source of enjoyment. A playfulness characterizes poems about writing in which sound and sense are exploited, often through a contrast of English, French, and German words. In "Fraises," while travelling through France, the speaker meets a Quebecker who explains that two gambolling dogs are "merr eh feess" (54) and, not surprisingly, when immersed in writing, she affirms "I'm really cooking now" (21).

Deepest fulfilment is found in singing and in song, however. For Helwig, the intensely satisfying art of music can set the world aright. Moreover, music's saving grace is open to all who will attend to its gift. The ancient and enduring connection between words and song is felt when the speaker counsels "even if you don't know the words / sing" (92); when she unashamedly sings "out loud before breakfast" (91); and in choir, where her "father sings beside me again" (96). "In Concert" glorifies Helwig's three principal sources of pleasure -

Soprano lines and lines of
honey coming off
the spoon onto hot toast
our audience
our loved ones
catch the sweet as it drops (46)

- food, language, and song.

Christine Wiesenthal's dramatic collection also explores the physical and emotional landscape of the past. Unlike Helwig, however, whose poems weave seamlessly across memory and time, Wiesenthal begins in the concrete present and moves slowly, powerfully back toward the personal past.

A first section of poems evokes the west that Wiesenthal knows well. Hers is a world of extremes, of unrelenting winters and fugitive summers. The opening poems celebrate the early summer appearance of wild caragana, the August lingering of wild finches, and contrast strikingly with subsequent poems of "the brown bald hills" (17) of the west. As she moves deeper into the stark landscape and the darkness of her writing, Wiesenthal evokes the fleeting fragility of beauty - flowers and birds of summer, for example, "swimming with life" (29) - as her particular offering of light.

Wiesenthal is bound and terrorized by the geography of the west. The badlands, formed "when the prairie cracked / a wicked joke . . . / froze that way, gaping open got lockjaw / /cleft its own palate" (20), suggest a hidden life that intrigues the speaker. Rather than seek to unearth the past, she wonders whether "all these ancient embarrassments & private affairs" were "better left shut up" (20). The metaphor of the terrible, twisted earth that so mesmerizes and repels - for what it reveals of the past, in the form of fossils and dinosaur bones, and for what it withholds from human knowledge - shapes Wiesenthal's vision. She can accept a severe landscape and appreciate its benign moments as transitory.

The poems in the second section are characterized by dark humour. Several poems about art probe the relationship between audience and subject, in particular the observer's desire to absorb or possess the artist's work. Forced to wait in an endless queue to enter an exhibit of Monet's paintings, in a separate poem the speaker proclaims, "There is no place like Saskatchewan / for a retrospective show, the gallery / clean, uncluttered as a prairie horizon" (36). Unlike the cloistered British Royal Academy of Arts in which Monet's paintings are displayed as rarefied art, the bare and unclaimed space of the prairie facilitates a viewer's engagement with artist Marilyn Levine's work in leather. In "Restoration of the Virgin Queen," Wiesenthal animates a portrait of Elizabeth who frowns at experts "who have wrenched off her huge gold / frame" (39). For the poet, every work of art has an integrity that an attentive viewer will discover. Art is inseparable from geography and connected intimately with daily living.

An ironic playfulness also is evident in the prose poem sequence "The Laundry Cycle," which parodies laundry advice offered to women from 1831 to the present day. In poems that review the laundering of blues, whites, delicates, coloured and colourfast clothing, the speaker exposes the absurdity of guides that have sought to elevate the work of laundresses, said to be "grappling at a material level with the dirty / problems of undiluted metaphysical evil transcendent cosmic horrors / . . . even splendid unfathomable spiritual mysteries" (45). The overvaluation of household laundering - represented ironically as women's highest calling - is read by Wiesenthal as an historically effective means of domesticating women as homemakers.

The mother who figures as homemaker in "The Laundry Cycle" also appears in the final section of the volume, as do the speaker's father and siblings. In a stunning conclusion, Wiesenthal excavates a personal past that attracts her and threatens her simultaneously. Here, she returns to her childhood and youth in Canada where she was raised by German-born parents who arrived in this country following World War Two. With determined honesty, Wiesenthal limns a woman's inability - her mother flutters like a "moth" (79) on the periphery of family drama - to counter a husband's brutal treatment of her children. Angered by the bedtime laughter of his eldest daughter, "once he sent her skull reeling / into the closet door / with a screech & a snap" (53). By far the most shocking revelation of the volume is the suggestion that the speaker's father may have been a Nazi. In fact, the poem "ii. hitler baby" is accompanied by a photograph of Adolph Hitler admiring a three-year-old boy, said to be the speaker's father. Wiesenthal explores her German roots in poems that evoke Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill, and Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a resistance fighter in Berlin. The poems in this section, open, daring, and finally comfortless, arrive at a chilling resolve: the speaker determines "there things are / i forget" (82). But for Wiesenthal and Helwig, the past is present; it will not be forgotten.