Nico Rogers’ collection of prose poems about life in the outport towns of Newfoundland a generation ago has a close precedent in Michael Crummey’s Hard Light (1988), also published by Brick Books. The first half of Hard Light contains prose poem monologues in the voices of various Newfoundland characters; Crummey calls his book “a collaboration between [himself] and Newfoundlanders past and present.” Rogers doesn’t use quite the same terms, but his debt to the Newfoundland oral tradition (and to the ubiquitous Dictionary of Newfoundland English) is acknowledged.

“Barking Down a Tree,” the first poem, is a set of instructions on how to strip the bark from a tree, to “roof your stores and tilts, your homes, even insulate walls … cover the cod from rain.” In “Olive Oil,” a sickly newborn is kept in a bread pan in the warmer of a coal-fire stove until he strengthens, becoming “a constant tender whimper wrapped in warm linen.” The young man in “Counting on a Coin” has a coming-of-age realization regarding his place in the world: “We were a cursed lot whose life was never going to get better,” he says. “We were bottom-of-the-barrel people, too skinny and poor and ugly to float up with the good fat.”

In an author’s note, Rogers explains that he drew heavily on his research at Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Folklore and Language Archives, as well as on interviews he conducted “with a great number of people who had once lived in communities like the one [his] ancestors founded in the early 1800s.” Doubtless, he knows a good story when he hears it, but his delivery lacks a natural storyteller’s finesse. In his book, Crummey proves he has a knack for pithy summations that nail down a story like a timely punch line does a joke. By contrast, Rogers, having found a good thing, tends to go on for pages past the limits of his audience’s patience.