Hard Light

R.G. Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and the author of The Salvation
Army and the Public.

The cover of this book features a reproduction of one of David
Blackwood’s famous paintings, Splitting Table. Michael Crummey conveys
in words the same essential Newfoundland psyche that Blackwood captures
in his spare but evocative paintings. In Hard Light, such activities as
“Making the Fish,” preparing “Jiggs’ Dinner,” and “Naming
the Islands” are invested with subtle ironies that preclude mere
nostalgia. We see, as John Steffler puts it, the effect of “human
desire” coming “up against rock.” Using reproductions of actual
deeds and wills and maps, refashioned stories of aunts and uncles, and
poems based on the diary of Captain John Froude, Crummey takes us on
outer and inner journeys from which we return with an understanding of
eternal forces too powerful to conquer but always necessary to
challenge.

Crummey is not only clever in his manipulation of materials; he is a
brilliant stylist, never obscure and rarely pedantic. Like Blackwood’s
painted pictures, his word pictures cause painful pleasure.