Hard Light

Crummey’s collection of short stories and poems is an attempt to preserve and honour Newfoundland’s past, specifically the history of the fisheries, which had been the mainstay of the lives of so many Newfoundlanders, including Crummey's father.  “I had a real sense that Dad was the last living connection to this world, and I went home to try and get some of it on paper,” says Crummey. His father’s generation saw the Newfoundland industrial revolution, which replaced fishing traditions that had been at the heart of life in Newfoundland for centuries. When Crummey got it on paper, he had a diverse collection of snapshots detailing the past—luminous and happy moments, as well as darker times. These snapshots capture the Victorian period, as well as the 1930s and 1940s. Some have considered Hard Light Crummey’s best book, which Crummey, in an interview with Leo Furey for The Antigonish Review, attributed to his inspiration, his family, which accounts for the strong biographical bent of Hard Light.

The book is organized into three sections, each with a different flavour. The first section, entitled “32 Little Stories,” is further subdivided into the elements of water, earth, fire, and air. The stories link to the elements, often in terms of imagery or metaphor, giving them a coherence that, perhaps surprisingly, does not feel forced. These short stories depict Crummey’s family history even through archival-like documents such as “East by the Sea and West by the Sea” or the recipe for “Jiggs’ Dinner.” The method of salting cod in “Making the Fish” illustrates the pittance received for difficult, repetitious work through the repetitious rhythm of the prose. Quill & Quire reviewer John D. Lee criticized the lack of tension deriving from the tedious lists. However, the prose reflects the job: “Two cuts down each side, sound bone pulled clear, splayed cod dropped into the puncheons tub. Two cuts, sound bone pulled clear, cod into the tub. Two cuts, pull, into tub.”

The second section is a cycle of biographical poems about Captain John Froude. Crummey expands on the diary of Froude, published by Jesperson Press in 1983. The poems are divided into three sections: “Learning the Price of Fish 1874-1887,” “Expecting to be Changed 1887-1894,” and “Understanding the Heart 1894-1932.” Froude sails away from Newfoundland, only to have numerous adventures around the globe; he eventually returns to the colony after learning how insular his own world had been.

The third and final section is a series of poems about a more contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador. It was inspired by a trip Crummey took with his father in 1995. He records the poverty of the Innu at Davis Inlet in “Hunter & Gatherers,” which describes the people “robbed even of a sense of loss.” In “Newfoundland Sealing Disaster” he depicts the tragic sealing season of 1914 through the description of the blizzard which led to the deaths of many sealers from the S.S. Newfoundland adrift on the ice. The “bitter wind doled out / their final, pitiful wages.” The harshness of most employments on the coast is further poeticized in “Cousin,” which links the bones of a whale flipper and the hands of the whalers, who lie in graves on Saddle Island, the result of “a common misfortune.”

The speakers of the pieces in this collection vary, even within sections. However, most speakers are pragmatic, with no-nonsense approaches to often romanticized institutions of marriage. One speaker details the wisdom of not making a declaration of love until a couple has consumed their first bag of flour. Sometimes the speakers are boys, as in “The Way Things Were,” which juxtaposes the riches of first-class passengers on board the famous S.S. Kyle, passengers who drink twelve-year-old scotch, with the workers in the holds, who eat hard tack. Sometimes speakers are unknown, as in “Stones,” as the task of neutering cats with metal shears is depicted as a necessary, cruel thing.

This collection is oriented towards preserving Newfoundland and Labrador’s past, evident in the anecdotes and descriptions from the outport life of Crummey’s father. His father’s generation saw the transformation of traditional resource industries—albeit with the help of electric lights and inboard motors—to a modernized fishery, then practically no fishery. Descriptions of work include the knowledge that death is a possibility in many of the jobs, whether fishing or sealing. Mortality even overshadows childhood pranks, as a boy in “Kite” wishes he had been hit by his brother so he would have a scar to remember him by, “Before the sky carried him off for good.” Though some of the poems and stories have been fictionalized, they represent snapshots of a pre-Confederation Newfoundland, neither glorifying the past nor crucifying it.