Description
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.
About the author
Michael Crummey is the author of four books of poetry, and a book of short stories, Flesh and Blood. His first novel, River Thieves, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, his second, The Wreckage, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His most recent novel, the bestselling Galore, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. Under the Keel is his first collection in a decade. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Excerpt: Salvage (by (author) Michael Crummey)
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.
Other titles by
The Adversary
A Novel
Passengers
The Innocents
Most of What Follows is True
Places Imagined and Real
Little Dogs
New and Selected Poems
Hard Light
Brick Books Classics 5
Sweetland
Under the Keel special hardcover edition
Special Edition
The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry
