In other words, in his poetry he tells stories, and in his prose his stories are infused with poetry. The second is that most of his poems are narratives, or at least imply narratives. Its language inhabits him in a way that takes him as far as one can get from the utilitarian prose of a Toronto memo. This may in part be a gift of his birthplace.
The first is the musicality of his language. When approaching Crummey, a good place to begin is his 2016 anthology of poetry, Little Dogs, a consolidation of the best pieces from four previously published works along with 23 new poems. This, at least, is what I infer from the way his words ring. John’s, I suspect Crummey experiences the English language (and it shapes his imagination) in utterly different ways. On May 11th, I posted a poem here as a complaint about my inherited language, the prosaic and functional English of the Toronto business world which has the effect of flattening the imagination. With The Innocents, Crummey spins out beautiful words to create a near-perfect novel. It communicates itself more as a feeling than as a knowing. But if your cloth is woven from a fine thread and if the shirts you sew from it are a perfect fit, well then … It’s hard for me to say what you have. Conversely, you can spin the finest thread and weave it into the most luxuriant fabric, but if the resulting clothes are ill-fitting, again, they are unwearable. You can make shirts of the finest cut, but if the fabric is woven from coarse thread, it will still be unwearable. By contrast, The Innocents is a good novel that has the benefit of polish.
While Reproduction is a good novel, I found it ragged around the edges, like a first draft crying out for more attention. You know what they say: if you can’t say anything good … I note a single laconic entry in my personal journal: “No sparks.” Having finished Crummey’s book, I’m in a better position now to say that the wrong person won the prize. I never wrote anything here about Reproduction. Among other things, The Innocents, by Michael Crummey, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, losing out to Reproduction by Ian Williams.
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