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.
