A Selection of poems from Hard Light, originally published by Brick Books 1998
Hard Light: 32 Little Stories is a retelling and reinvention of tales told to Michael Crummey by his father and other family members about outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery of a half-century ago. It’s a love-letter to a world and a way of life that has vanished completely in the last fifty years. All of it is true. Even the lies. Hard Light: 32 Little Stories on Myspace.com Book Reviews: …fully inhabits the earth, air, fire and water of Newfoundland…outstanding. The Globe & Mail … an exquisitely evocative world…the apparently ordinary shimmers with a matter of fact clarity guaranteed to curl your toes. The Toronto Star Audio Book Reviews: From AudioFile Magazine: This collection by Newfoundland poet and fiction writer Michael Crummey was published in book form in 1998, but it feels more comfortable as an audio because it’s grounded in an oral tradition. These brief stories—most just two or three minutes long—are based on tales Crummey heard from friends and family, particularly his late father. The two narrators have contrasting styles that work well together—Ron Hynes’s salty male voice describes daily life, such as “making the fish” (processing cod), while Deidre Gillard-Rowlings’s animated female voice relates the more colorful stories of youthful misadventures. Like a great family story, HARD LIGHT can be heard in one sitting but gets better with repeated listening. From Jay Ruzesky, Malahat Review: There is something pleasing about being read to, especially by practiced voices like Ron Hynes and Deidre Gillard-Rowlings, so it is a delight to hear the prose and poetry from Michael Crummey’s Hard Light collected on CD. This audiobook is more than entertainment. It reminds me of Glenn Gould’s 1969 radio documentary, The Latecomers, which is a piece that stretched my ideas about form. In that recording, Gould orchestrates a chorus of voices, fading them in, out, and over each other in a nonlinear way to create an impressionistic tableau that is a portrait of life in Newfoundland. Hard Light is similarly a nonlinear sketch of life on The Rock, and particularly a portrait of Crummey’s family. It begins with a poem called “Rust” about the hands of a father that look like “a moon rising at the tip of each finger” so that they represent “distance” and “other worlds.” His hands are abused by the repetition of “bodies of codfish opened with a blade” and become an image of a map etched by “daily necessities” and “the habits of generation”. These hands display the residue of memory, and of a way of life in “time’s indelible scar.” Looking at a pair of hands can speak of a community; given the labours of these hands, it is not hard to imagine that the experience of others must be similar. In this way, Crummey establishes his methodology in this poem – by telling stories of individuals, he will represent a whole people. The pieces that follow are stories of storms, journeys, work, injustice, and loss. There are also recipes, land-title documents, and songs. Each piece has its own flavour and contributes to the whole. What comes through is a strong sense of place and tradition, and of an environment that is inhospitable and unpredictable, but embraced by the spirited people who remain there.