Gerald Lampert Memorial Award–­winning poet and novelist Elisabeth Harvor’s third poetry collection could be loosely described as a book of coming of age poems. Much of it parses childhood for moments of suddenly earned wisdom and the accompanying sloughing off of innocence.

Narrated in the second person, “Island of Illness” examines a child’s early acquaintance with death and loss. A crow is “beheaded by the windmill your father // bolted to the roof of the kiln house,” and an orphaned fawn, having spent some time as a kind of family pet, is eventually shot by a hunter, just as its mother was before it. The fawn’s death prefigures less dramatic adult losses: the death of a romance; the painful memory of a student “you were unfair to in a tutorial once.”

While Harvor is capable of making interesting metaphoric connections (a cooling kiln that “give[s] off its weak tinkles” in “Blowtorch Alchemy” is likened to a “debilitated music box”), she often settles for whatever comes to hand. Fall leaves are, unremarkably and imprecisely, “armies / of multiple yellow”; predictably, “smashed-off glassy sections” of ice are likened to “broken window panes.”

Harvor’s most compelling poems draw their power not from the language, which can be fairly prosaic, but from the stories they tell. The dramatic implication of the title of “Burning Hammock, 1917” is more of a spur to readers than the poem’s simple declarative set-up: “One night the sister in charge / is called down to the wounded boy in his sling. // His heel is caught in the hammock’s / webbing, causing him discomfort.” Our attention hinges not on the technique of the poem itself, but on the promise of disaster. Reading Harvor’s poems, one gets the nagging sense that many of them would have been more comfortable as prose.