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...Hard Light, including the experience of work, the power of landscape, and the persistence of culture. It is followed by a selection of Crummey's poems.
EN 1998, L'ECRIVAIN NE EN TERRE-NEUVE, Michael Crummey a publie Hard Light, une collection de poemes de recits courts qui explorent l'experience de ses ancetres dans un port isole en Terre-Neuve et dans une pecherie au Labrador au 19e siecle ainsi qu'au debut du 20e siecle. Cet article explore les themes principaux de Hard Light, y compris l'experience de la main-d'ceuvre, la force de la nature et la persistance de la culture. Il est suivi d'une selection des poemes de Crummey.
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BORN IN THE MINING TOWN of Buchans, Newfoundland, Michael Crummey was raised there and in Wabush, Labrador. His first book of poems, Arguments with Gravity, was published in 1996. Hard Light appeared in 1998 and was followed by a book of stories, Flesh & Blood, and another collection of poems, Emergency Roadside Assistance. A novel, River Thieves, was released in 2001 and was short-listed for the Giller Prize, a prestigious award for Canadian fiction. He currently lives in St. John's. (1)
As a writer, Crummey approaches characters not as isolated individuals but as beings whose identities are inseparable from their landscape and culture; and culture for him is inseparable from the work people do, inseparable from the tools and routines they have devised to exploit the resources and ward off the dangers in the places where they live. This approach is especially apparent in Hard Light, a collection of poems and short prose narratives having to do with his ancestors' lives in rural Newfoundland and Labrador.
Crummey announces his subject and suggests something about the way he is going to handle it at the beginning of Hard Light in a piece called "Rust," where he describes his father's hands and tries to imagine the lifetime of work that has given them their scarred and callused shape. (9) For one thing, rather than the mere facts, it is a sense of the physical immediacy of his father's past he is after, the way he had to grapple with the world and its economic imperatives, and what that felt like from the inside. The concrete particulars of daily life are prominent in all the poems and stories that Hard Light contains. People are always involved in physical activities: splitting and salting fish, digging potatoes, baking bread, making fires, and handling the rigging on storm-tossed ships. Their activities define them more than any account of their property or social status or personal appearance.
Throughout Hard Light, Crummey uses whatever fragments of evidence are available to conjure up the past: scars, photographs, and family lore. Above all it is his father's stories he uses. In the poet's mind these take...
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