Salvage [Paperback]

Salvage, Michael Crummey's third volume of poetry, begins with a rare joke, one that is almost too apt: "Sad Book Ahead. / Poems about Loss / Next 100 pgs." This seems like a charming quirk, even in a poem titled "Kissing the Dead: A Disclaimer," but Crummey means it. This is a melancholic little book.

Salvage is a predominantly rural collection, and it meanders between full-on nature poetry and more human meditations on death and lost love. Crummey's landscapes are, surprisingly, the best poems included here. They show not a trace of the New Age malarkey that infests much contemporary nature writing, and their language is quietly elegant and gently transformative (northern lights, for instance, become "enormous seines of light.") The poems about people are less sure-footed--they stray into unappealingly mixed metaphors and are sometimes too gloomy to be convincing. In one of the book's concluding poems, the speaker tells us

it's true no measure of content
could make me love my life
as fiercely as learning to live with loss.

After so much disenchantment, this is difficult to believe in. Salvage feels like a book by a man who is in love with the substance of the world but utterly dismayed by the people in it.

Salvage is worthwhile for the quality of its nature poems, and anyone who enjoyed his Giller Prize finalist, River Thieves, will want to look at Crummey's verse. There is little cheer here, though; this book is best saved for a summer storm or a long December night. --Jack Illingworth

Salvage is a beautifully crafted new book of poems. It opens with a signpost alerting the reader to “Poems about Loss/ Next 100 Pages,” poems about loved ones, relationships, innocence, faith – all gone. But paradoxically people and events in Michael Crummey’s embrace are too vivid to fade away. Summer and winter visits to a Finnish cemetery in Northern Ontario, the aftermath of a mysterious act of arson in Kingston, Ontario, a run around fogged-in Quidi Vidi Lake, St. John’s, Newfoundland – these experiences and others are rendered indelible in spare, luminous poems infused with conscience and heightened attention. Michael Crummey will break your heart and mend it too.

Michael Crummey is the author of three books of poetry, Arguments with Gravity, winner of the Writer’s Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry, Hard Light, and, most recently, Salvage. He has also published a book of short stories, Flesh & Blood; two acclaimed, bestselling novels, River Thieves and The Wreckage; and collaborated with photographer Greg Locke on Newfoundland: Journey into a Lost Nation. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

HOW HE CARRIED IT

It hovered in the boy’s head pale
as a daylight moon

It lit him up like a field
under a hail of lightning,
it torched the buildings locked
and almost hidden under brush
in the unfenced backyard of his mind

It travelled in his blood like blooms
of silt stirred from a river bottom,
it ticked like a clock toward
some alarm his body
lay awake for,
it made him feel ancient and
unrecoverable and lonely
for his friends

It churned inside him
like the crankshaft of the planet,
darkness endlessly turning
toward a deeper darkness
he had no name for

It settled on him like squatters
claiming farmland lying fallow,
like summer dusk staining
the distant hills blue

A Word about the Poem by Michael Crummey
This one drives my mother crazy. What is the “it” that he carries, she wants to know, but I’m not telling. The “it” is a very particular thing to me, but I was interested in writing a poem that circled and circled the specific without nailing a name to it, which would allow a reader to make their own guess at what lies at the centre. I wanted the poem to have an incantatory feel, letting a progression of images build one upon the other with the hope that by the end something adhered. And I’m honestly not sure if anything does.