In his poetry, short stories, and his novel, River Thieves, Michael Crummey makes effortless music on the page. Like a sculptor giving equal attention to the immediate carved surface and the overall shape he has in mind, Crummey can whittle a sentence to convey startling imagery without distracting from the narrative thrust or having the words take on a purple cast.

There is much in Crummey’s latest collection of poems, Salvage, that is pure pleasure – even though the poems are predominantly about solitude and loss. The work contains all of Crummey’s metaphorical deftness and his winning, understated voice. Crummey’s touch is also delicate enough to construct series of unfolding images that work like time-lapse sequences to carry a poem’s emotional weight. In a poem about blues musician Blind Willie Johnson, the imagery suggests a complex man whose music spoke of salvation and despair: “the waver of each note a kind of anguish,/embers kindling in a breeze,/dark blisters of light.”

Still, expectations of this Giller Prize-nominated author are high, and they aren’t always met here. The first poem in the collection, a wry comparison of psychic wounds to potholes in a road, is so adroit and moving that the rest of the book never quite recaptures its bravery and self-deprecating tone. Crummey occasionally indulges himself, overusing star imagery to the point of triteness, for instance, and making a few dangerous swerves toward cliché, as in a poem about a pomegranate and a departed lover that resorts to a shop-worn image of “that pit at the core/of sweetness.”

Fortunately for readers, Crummey won’t rest on his sheer verbal dexterity. He’s shown he can handle a novel’s sweep and a poem’s microscopic attentions with the same measure of skill. Salvage is an important volume in a career that bears watching.