Poet and novelist David Helwig is a notable member of the generation of talented and prolific writers who came to prominence in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. Like his more famous fellow graduate of the University of Toronto, Margaret Atwood, he has turned his hand to various kinds of writing: poems, short stories, plays, novels, radio and television scripts, reviews, and even an unpublished libretto for an opera. If some of his books are more successful and memorable than others, all are well crafted.

An only child, Helwig was born in Toronto and lived in Hamilton for a time before his parents, William Gordon and Ivy Lorraine Abbott Helwig, settled at Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1948. For generations many of his father's family were German cabinetmakers; his mother's were English paperhangers and painters. His father worked at the De Havilland aircraft plant and then made office furniture until he opened...