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Under the Keel
The brilliant new collection from Michael Crummey, bestselling author of Galore . Michael Crummey’s first collection in a decade has something for Love and marriage and airport grief; how not to get laid in a Newfoundland mining town; total immersion baptism; the grand machinery of decay; migrant music and invisible crowns and mortifying engagements with babysitters; the transcendent properties of home brew. Whether charting the merciless complications of childhood, or the unpredictable consolations of middle age, these are poems of magic and ruin. Under the Keel affirms Crummey’s place as one of our necessary writers.
120 pages, Paperback
First published April 9, 2013
3 people are currently reading
182 people want to read
About the author
Michael Crummey
26 books1,001 followersBorn in Buchans, Newfoundland, Crummey grew up there and in Wabush, Labrador, where he moved with his family in the late 1970s. He went to university with no idea what to do with his life and, to make matters worse, started writing poems in his first year. Just before graduating with a BA in English he won the Gregory Power Poetry Award. First prize was three hundred dollars (big bucks back in 1987) and it gave him the mistaken impression there was money to be made in poetry.
He published a slender collection of poems called Arguments with Gravity in 1996, followed two years later by Hard Light. 1998 also saw the publication of a collection of short stories, Flesh and Blood, and Crummey's nomination for the Journey Prize.
Crummey's debut novel, River Thieves (2001) was a Canadian bestseller, winning the Thomas Head Raddall Award and the Winterset Award for Excellence in Newfoundland Writing. It was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the IMPAC Award. His second novel, The Wreckage (2005), was nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and longlisted for the 2007 IMPAC Award.
Galore was published in Canada in 2009. A national bestseller, it was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Canada & Caribbean), the Canadian Authors' Association Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Governor-General's Award for fiction.
He lives in St. John's, Newfoundland with his wife and three step-kids.
He published a slender collection of poems called Arguments with Gravity in 1996, followed two years later by Hard Light. 1998 also saw the publication of a collection of short stories, Flesh and Blood, and Crummey's nomination for the Journey Prize.
Crummey's debut novel, River Thieves (2001) was a Canadian bestseller, winning the Thomas Head Raddall Award and the Winterset Award for Excellence in Newfoundland Writing. It was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the IMPAC Award. His second novel, The Wreckage (2005), was nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and longlisted for the 2007 IMPAC Award.
Galore was published in Canada in 2009. A national bestseller, it was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Canada & Caribbean), the Canadian Authors' Association Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Governor-General's Award for fiction.
He lives in St. John's, Newfoundland with his wife and three step-kids.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
February 24, 2014
This is my favourite publication I've read by Crummey. The poems have a great ease of flow. They're also very personal and confessional. Under the Keel has nothing as cathartic or revealing as something by Sylvia Plath, but honesty, no matter how trivial, always takes courage.
November 1, 2021
Boys will be boys and "Under the Keel" by Michael Crummey certainly begins with a series of free verse poems describing the delinquent obsessions of young males. Meet the "Catholic girl who taught me to neck" (p. 3) with "her mouth a marriage of cigarettes/and Wrigley's spearmint" (p. 3). Read poems with titles such as "The Murky Ditch", "Cock Tease" and "The Mud Hole". And what about the narrator who was "almost fourteen and still a virgin" (p. 18)?
At this point I put the book aside.
Months later, I try again! I wade through the "English accent pickled in alcohol" (p. 21) and the minke whale that 'disappears/like a drunk driver fleeing a minor/accident" (p. 28). I begin to feel the ebb and flow of the ocean tide near Newfoundland and it transports me towards titles such as "Pub Crawl in Dublin", "Grand Canal Hangover", and the final poem "The Stars, After John's Homebrew".
Before I know it, this Canadian poet has yanked me "Under the Keel" to experience death, memories of the past, dreams, and even the resurrection of apparitions.
I am star-struck even more as I begin to analyze and unravel the poet's descriptions of place and characters and his powerful use of poetic devices from metaphors and similes to experiments with rhyme and even a list poem.
He is like the photographer in his poem "Viewfinder" who captures the past with a Brownie camera. Not only does his words preserve every precise detail but there is an intellectual depth with layered meanings flowing throughout the collection's 106-pages. For example note the biblical references such as the use of the title "Through a Glass Darkly" and did you know "Dead Man's Pond" is actually a real place in Newfoundland?
And even though, Crummey focuses on some of the tattered edges of life with "a duct-taped carnival/of slapstick clowns" (p. 23) and even stars with "their thorny glare/rattling the dark like a length of sheet-metal" (p. 101), I loved this book because it shook me more than once.
It made me think and view the world from a male and different perspective!
At this point I put the book aside.
Months later, I try again! I wade through the "English accent pickled in alcohol" (p. 21) and the minke whale that 'disappears/like a drunk driver fleeing a minor/accident" (p. 28). I begin to feel the ebb and flow of the ocean tide near Newfoundland and it transports me towards titles such as "Pub Crawl in Dublin", "Grand Canal Hangover", and the final poem "The Stars, After John's Homebrew".
Before I know it, this Canadian poet has yanked me "Under the Keel" to experience death, memories of the past, dreams, and even the resurrection of apparitions.
I am star-struck even more as I begin to analyze and unravel the poet's descriptions of place and characters and his powerful use of poetic devices from metaphors and similes to experiments with rhyme and even a list poem.
He is like the photographer in his poem "Viewfinder" who captures the past with a Brownie camera. Not only does his words preserve every precise detail but there is an intellectual depth with layered meanings flowing throughout the collection's 106-pages. For example note the biblical references such as the use of the title "Through a Glass Darkly" and did you know "Dead Man's Pond" is actually a real place in Newfoundland?
And even though, Crummey focuses on some of the tattered edges of life with "a duct-taped carnival/of slapstick clowns" (p. 23) and even stars with "their thorny glare/rattling the dark like a length of sheet-metal" (p. 101), I loved this book because it shook me more than once.
It made me think and view the world from a male and different perspective!
January 18, 2022
I stopped after reading the poem "Cock Tease". This is not a question of whether or not I am easily offended. This is a question of bad taste. It is in bad taste to simultaneously sexualize a 12-year-old girl and condemn her for her sexuality. It is in bad taste to act superior to her by writing a poem about how you were "embarrassed to court / her" and yet "risked the taint / of her reputation's promise" (the poet has embarrassed himself, and should take responsibility for embarrassing himself rather than blaming a 12-year-old girl from his past).
She had a raw mouth for twelve,
barely-there breasts and a name that made
her reckless and surly by turns.
She liked to be touched and could see
it might be her undoing, she fended off
advances with a savage fatalism
or shifted just out of reach like a sunbather
avoiding a creeping block of shade.
It was wrong to want the kind of attention
boys were willing to give her
and she circled as close as she could
without brushing against it,
she brushed against it with her eyes
averted before startling away
like something scalded.
I was embarrassed to court
her company but risked the taint
for her reputation's promise,
hand working beneath her cotton shirt,
fingers grazing the surprising length
of a nipple before she bolted,
though never far enough to shut the door
completely. That crude tug of war
was everything on offer between us
and we chafed against each
other with a sour sort
of affection.- Cock Tease, pg. 12-13
February 8, 2018
(Poetry, Atlantic Canadian)
I have read all of Michael Crummey’s prose, including River Thieves and Sweetland to which I gave 5 stars in September 2014.
But I had never read of his poetry, which is his first vocation.
The title of this book refers to the poem Fathom, and the lines that describe the wound on his dog’s shaved shoulder:
like a line across a gunwale
as it rises on an easy swell,
new stitches like a row of knots tied
to sound fathoms under the keel.
I don’t know how to comment on poetry but I do know that I loved these poems. I borrowed this from the library – and then bought myself a copy for my own shelf.
5 stars
I have read all of Michael Crummey’s prose, including River Thieves and Sweetland to which I gave 5 stars in September 2014.
But I had never read of his poetry, which is his first vocation.
The title of this book refers to the poem Fathom, and the lines that describe the wound on his dog’s shaved shoulder:
like a line across a gunwale
as it rises on an easy swell,
new stitches like a row of knots tied
to sound fathoms under the keel.
I don’t know how to comment on poetry but I do know that I loved these poems. I borrowed this from the library – and then bought myself a copy for my own shelf.
5 stars
September 2, 2014
This is Crummy’s first collection of poetry in ten years, and it is a wonderful volume that I thoroughly enjoyed. All of the poems are accessible to the reader who enjoys poetry but may not have an academic understanding of its many nuances. I do not always understand all I read with some poets, and I am sometimes left questioning what a particular piece is all about. But this collection is full of subjects everyone can relate to and enjoy, with a conversational tone and a lighted moment of revelation in each of them. The pieces also have a wonderful rhythm and cadence that allows the words to flow and that is enjoyable to listen to as the words roll off your tongue.
The opening section is full of common experiences we all remember from our youth: the awkwardness of being a teenager, the all-pervasive need to belong to a group and the pack mentality that pervaded it, the pulsating lust we could hardly understand but were anxious to explore and learn more about by doing, the absolute boredom while we waited for our real lives to begin and the longing for it to happen soon. All these are recognizable moments we can think back on and remember, even though we have spent years living our lives as experienced adults. Although those times may not seem such heady concerns now, we still remember the absolute angst with which we faced them.
The collection also includes four poems the author wrote for his wife Holly on their wedding day. They speak of personal confessions, fear of intimacy and what it may bring and the simple joy of lying naked on the bed next to a loved one. It also includes times spent with his dying father as one new door to life with his wife opens and another door with his father and his birth family begins to close. The commitment of his mother to care for his dying father, leads him to question whether he has been a coward all his life, avoiding “tying himself to something as frail/ as another person”. And so he is led to make a lifelong commitment to his new wife “a promise I will make---/to stay by you, to be fully awake”.
There are also some interesting poems that describe a Newfoundland from long ago and a man’s attempts to photograph the locals. The spark for these poems may have come from the author's time sequestered in “The Rooms” in Newfoundland, where he spent many hours buried among old photographs. There is the repeated command to “stay still” and the questioning concern of the subjects as to why anyone would chose to photograph them. There is also the modest woman who did not want her picture taken, because she was so embarrassed that the photographer had seen her underwear on the clothesline. Also included are poems about a retiring gap toothed lighthouse keeper who warns his replacement about the desolate and lonely life on Rag’s Island, and whose parting advice to the man taking over his job is to “drink as much as you can”. And then there is the priest, “Brother Harold up to his arse /in the shallows”, who performs full immersion baptisms, and who “drowns each sinner/in the stinging cold”, the water “so cold going under/it’s like being shorn/front and back/with a rusty blade”. These all portray characters of the Newfoundland landscape who have since disappeared.
A moving poem (and one of my personal favourites), about a female fox whose craftiness and cunning allows her to survive a harsh winter ends abruptly and uncomfortably for the reader. There is also a poem about water polluted by the runoff from the mines, and the natural daring of children who do exactly what they have been told not to do when their parents are out of sight. There are even poems about Dublin and India, verbalizing that feverish longing to travel, wander and find adventure far away from the security of your homeland, even if it means being ultimately pulled back to wherever it is that we call home.
This is a collection that can be read in one or two sittings without losing its sense, its grace or its joy.
A very enjoyable read.
The opening section is full of common experiences we all remember from our youth: the awkwardness of being a teenager, the all-pervasive need to belong to a group and the pack mentality that pervaded it, the pulsating lust we could hardly understand but were anxious to explore and learn more about by doing, the absolute boredom while we waited for our real lives to begin and the longing for it to happen soon. All these are recognizable moments we can think back on and remember, even though we have spent years living our lives as experienced adults. Although those times may not seem such heady concerns now, we still remember the absolute angst with which we faced them.
The collection also includes four poems the author wrote for his wife Holly on their wedding day. They speak of personal confessions, fear of intimacy and what it may bring and the simple joy of lying naked on the bed next to a loved one. It also includes times spent with his dying father as one new door to life with his wife opens and another door with his father and his birth family begins to close. The commitment of his mother to care for his dying father, leads him to question whether he has been a coward all his life, avoiding “tying himself to something as frail/ as another person”. And so he is led to make a lifelong commitment to his new wife “a promise I will make---/to stay by you, to be fully awake”.
There are also some interesting poems that describe a Newfoundland from long ago and a man’s attempts to photograph the locals. The spark for these poems may have come from the author's time sequestered in “The Rooms” in Newfoundland, where he spent many hours buried among old photographs. There is the repeated command to “stay still” and the questioning concern of the subjects as to why anyone would chose to photograph them. There is also the modest woman who did not want her picture taken, because she was so embarrassed that the photographer had seen her underwear on the clothesline. Also included are poems about a retiring gap toothed lighthouse keeper who warns his replacement about the desolate and lonely life on Rag’s Island, and whose parting advice to the man taking over his job is to “drink as much as you can”. And then there is the priest, “Brother Harold up to his arse /in the shallows”, who performs full immersion baptisms, and who “drowns each sinner/in the stinging cold”, the water “so cold going under/it’s like being shorn/front and back/with a rusty blade”. These all portray characters of the Newfoundland landscape who have since disappeared.
A moving poem (and one of my personal favourites), about a female fox whose craftiness and cunning allows her to survive a harsh winter ends abruptly and uncomfortably for the reader. There is also a poem about water polluted by the runoff from the mines, and the natural daring of children who do exactly what they have been told not to do when their parents are out of sight. There are even poems about Dublin and India, verbalizing that feverish longing to travel, wander and find adventure far away from the security of your homeland, even if it means being ultimately pulled back to wherever it is that we call home.
This is a collection that can be read in one or two sittings without losing its sense, its grace or its joy.
A very enjoyable read.
February 3, 2015
Michael Crummey's poems all carry some kind of lingering taste of satisfaction—like each one of them is a mouthful of something homegrown, that leaves you wanting more, but still somehow happy.
There's a moment of revelation in almost every poem in this collection, though some of them were stronger than others. I found the brief flashes of religion the moist poignant—Crummey has an open and accessible voice all throughout, but it hits the hardest when he turns the lens in rather than out. Everything is a thought about something, and even the poems that are simple stories hint at something deeper.
There's a moment of revelation in almost every poem in this collection, though some of them were stronger than others. I found the brief flashes of religion the moist poignant—Crummey has an open and accessible voice all throughout, but it hits the hardest when he turns the lens in rather than out. Everything is a thought about something, and even the poems that are simple stories hint at something deeper.
May 28, 2013
A little Hemingway-esque. I liked the poems in the latter half of the collection. These poems reminded me of how short stories are written. Each poem was diverse; unique characters and stories. Tales of life, death and moments that at the time mean nothing at all until they are gone.
October 20, 2013
loved the poetry, like this from The Stars: and the stars, lord Jesus, the stars! the grit of sediment beginning to settle, their thorny glare rattling the dark like a length of sheet-metal.
September 12, 2016
A real journey. Honest and sparse. Beautiful.
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January 1, 2014Look for my review in CV2, the journal of contemporary verse.
March 27, 2014
Michael Crummey joined us at Kingston WritersFest 2009 and 2013. You can read more about Michael and the Festival here: www.kingstonwritersfest.ca
July 4, 2015
Michael Crummey is up there on my favourite Canada authors list. Favourite authors period list. And this book of poetry just solidified that. Earthy, real, vivid, ordinary life. This is good stuff.
May 6, 2016
I enjoyed this book. These poems are both personal and still full of poetic images.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews