Bailey's work explores questions of identity: family and roots--mostly working class--character portraits and poems of romance. There's much to admire in these short, clean stanzas and the landscape that shines through behind them--its pine trees and cold rain, its lobster and herring gear, its dark sky and restless ocean.

Fifty years after Alistair MacLeod honoured and elegized that world in "The Boat," Bailey summons the reality of that life in the twenty-first century, in language both visceral and eloquent. This is no quaint voice from the Land of Anne. Suffused with our era's geist and angst, which have penetrated to the rural periphery, Bailey is a sharp-eyed, clarion-voiced witness in his crow's nest. This book is a spy-glass you'll want to glue your eye to.

Chris Bailey canvasses easily--adroitly--that difficult, East Coast world of hardscrabble, hard-luck ports and hard-living, hard-drinking fishers, the epicureans of cynicism and the aesthetes of brutalism. This dominion's one where funerals are festive and the clear-eyed must enjoy adultery and the clear-headed must tolerate suicide. Think E.J. Pratt meets Charles Bukowski.