Nearly two decades since, I’ve read my fair share of Canadian poets. Sometimes they fall into that us-vs-wilderness trope, but more often I see Canadian poets exploring family histories or looking outward toward broader social issues—and I’d place Crummey within this rubric. arguments with gravity is divided into the following sections: 1) The Air Around Their Bodies, 2) One of The Lives I Have Not Lived, 3) Part of It, 4) Redefining the Kiss and 5) The River You Remember.
The first section deals with family histories and nature, including the poem “Apprenticeships,” that depicts the speaker learning—or trying to learn—drawing by sketching his father’s hands while he guts fish. Another short work in the collection, “Near Jack’s Pond Park,” we are offered a vignette of a pond—far from trying to conquer the wilderness and instead simply observing it:
The water is placid
ego-less
the perfect contemplation of the surface
mirrors blue sky
a stand of spruce trees on the shore.
A single loon moves toward
the water’s centre
a fluid ripple-less motion —
only the bird’s voice
makes it real
Diving, it disappears into
its own reflection
into the silence of the water’s forest
the strange depth of the dark boughs
waving below the surface (14)
It’s a quiet moment. I particularly like the quietness necessary for the single loon to move through ripple-less motion. The idea of the dark boughs waving below the surface is also a lovely image to document. Another beautiful poem in the collection offers some reflections on winter. Crummey focuses on some winter imagery that is beautiful, but which has a hint of an edge:
Frost laces the window
with white,
winter’s elegant geometry.
Fingernail traces
a crystal line,
ice crawling down the spine
like panic;
my mother’s voice on the telephone,
words falling like intricate
stars of snow,
spelling out
another human accident in
the green mathematics
of a Labrador forest.
Lost for days, probably,
trudging through the
emptiness of winter
reciting the alphabet
the sanity of the 9X tables
till the frost
bleached his mind clean
till he lay beneath the innocent trees,
his mouth a frozen blue vowel
his eyes sewn shut by
the sharp thread of the cold (79).
By contrast, there’s a poem called “Delayed” that offers some of the most visceral, gruesome imagery I’ve seen in poems lately. The poem starts off rather innocuously: a child being sent across the road for “milk, or bread, or some other necessity” (18). The child “pushed on his father’s over-sized shoes” (18) and “the driver of the Coca Cola truck / didn’t see him when he fell beneath the wheels, / only felt the boy’s presence there, the fragile skull / collapsing like a small unimportant star” (18). The simplicity of the delivery makes it all the more gruesome. The perspective then shifts to a speaker that witnesses the event. The speaker narrates, “I had been sent for milk as well — / a tarp thrown over the accident by then, / the corners held by cases of Cola, / and some of what the boy had been / spilled into the open air on the pavement, / as if still trying to make its way home” (18). The poem offers a dark concealment of the accident, which is so gruesome that it cannot be contained—it seeps into the street, past the tarp. The intimation of his blood spilling into the street contains an eerie parallel to the fragility of the Coca Cola bottles.
The poem continues with an account of the deceased boy’s brother:
A small town crowd had gathered and
his brother was there, crying on
the wooden steps of the store —
older than me, and someone
I had learned to be afraid of,
a fighter, cruel and stupidity fearless,
his twelve year old knuckles
white with scars.
I felt sorry for him then, seeing
what he had lost, watching his body shake
with sobs, as if a man’s fist held his shirt
and would not let go. (18)
I think that this stanza of the poem does a beautiful job of humanizing the characters and offering tenderness in an otherwise bleak scenario. What I find most compelling about the poem’s narrative, though, is what happens after. It seems so accurate to the awkwardness of human interaction in the face of tragedy. When something so horrendous happens, what do you do? How do you deal with it? In the case of the speaker of this poem, he has no other option but to continue his errand:
In the end I went inside to buy the milk,
feeling ridiculous with my handful of coins
and then the wet carton under my arm;
a circle of people surrounded
the yellow rustle of tarp
as if they expected a miracle,
but my mother was waiting at home
and I could not stay. (18)
I really appreciate the cultivation of this awkwardness. The futility of it all seems so true to life, so much so that the final stanza of the poem doesn’t even need to be included: “I climbed the hill toward our street, / the weight of something huge and wordless / in my step. I was late arriving that afternoon / and couldn’t properly explain / why I was delayed, and don’t expect / I’ve properly explained it now” (19).
Crummey’s heart is pretty clear in several of the pieces. Sometimes that heart is evidence through tenderness and tragedy. Sometimes that heart comes through in humour. There’s a poem called “David Donnell’s Schlong.” The poem is provided with an epigraph from Donnell’s collection What Men Have Instead of Skirts: “I’ve got fairly interesting genitals myself” (61). The poem itself is a scathing report on David Donnell’s poems, but what is even better is the note on the poem that appears in the back of the book. Michael Crummey does a statistical breakdown of poems in David Donnell’s Governor General’s Award Winning collection. Those are my italics because it’s so ridiculous. Crummey notes that there are 70 poems in the collection, 12 that reference the poet’s or another man’s penis, 9 that reference male genitalia, 21 that reference sex, 17 not counting the ones above that reference women in some state of undress or nudity. Crummey cheekily references some of the most egregious lines, even if they only appear once. It’s a great bit of culture jamming that critiques some broader issues in CanLit and the publishing industry.
There’s another part of the collection that includes two poems called “Redefining the Kiss: Women” and “Redefining the Kiss: Men.” Crummey is clearly striving for a reconceptualization of intimacy that does not rely on whatever David Donnell is up to. The poems themselves are okay, but what is most enjoyable are the direct parallels between them. Some of the phraseology repeats exactly. In the women version: “Sometimes I think a woman’s body is the only distance between a man and a woman, / sometimes it’s that distance I’m in love with” (57) and in the man version: “A man’s body is the distance / he puts between himself and other men, / and it’s a distance he’s in love with” (58). These reflections on intimacy are not entirely without fault. In the poem “Part of It,” Crummey describes being in love in El Salvador with a woman whom everyone was in love with. Her identity is tied up with the enthusiasm and idealism of revolution. The back half of the poem then recounts how she was arrested as a rebel and he projects the rest of her story from there. The speaker then operates in a confessional mode, noting that he is living comfortably in Kingston and trying to write a poem for “publication credit in a small, respected / Canadian literary journal” (48). There’s a core tension in the poem that is highlighted in the final stanza:
Some people have tried to justify this kind
of exploitation in the name of art
but to me that’s just rhetoric,
propaganda I can’t bring myself to believe in.
There are no excuses for the way we live our lives,
there isn’t even ignorance to cover our heads
with anymore.
I know you are being tortured in
a Salvadoran prison; I know you have been
raped there, and not just because you are
young and beautiful
and this poem is part of that too
somehow (49).
I struggle with that poem. It feels like a misstep. On the one hand it’s trying to disavow the kind of art and politics that borrows trauma for personal gain or artistic vision—and yet, the poem still made it into the collection. How different is it from David Donnell, at its core?
In any case, there is a whole series of poems about El Salvador and Oscar Romero. This is the part of CanLit that looks outward. Not interesting enough as a country of our own, presumably, I think there’s a trend of looking globally for inspiration and for political action. I can’t really fault Crummey for that; his passion for the subject is evident and far be it from me to suggest that we always have to look for issues at home when we are sometimes called elsewhere.
All things considered, I’m glad to have finally read Crummey’s poetry. It wasn’t the most memorable collection I’ve read—particularly because I can’t seem to help reading it through the lens of CanLit—but it wasn’t bad and if you don’t like it, hey—it’s only like 100 pages.
Happy reading, everyone!
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