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Shortlisted for the 1999 Milton Acorn Memorial People’s Poetry Prize In Hard Light Michael Crummey retells and reinvents his father’s stories of outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery of a half century ago. Speaking through generations of storytellers, he conjures a world of hard toil and heavy weather, shot through with stoicism, grim humour, endurance, and love. This is writing that is supple and charged with intensity, language that vivifies — electrifies — whoever and whatever it describes. “Michael Crummey’s lucid, dexterous writing shies away from nothing, gives us the concrete particulars of daily life, the burials and butcheries, the night-time thoughts. He knows this world from the inside.” – John Steffler