1 It is dangerous to allow an author too much authority to frame her work just the way she wants, but The Bosun Chair is best understood, and most kindly reviewed, in the context of the author’s own interpretation of her work as the subgenre “second-generation diaspora literature.” Delisle tells us in her prologue of the rootlessness of hearing stories of “home,” a home that is not her natal Alberta but her parents’ and ancestors’ Newfoundland. The prologue provides the weaving together of intergenerational echoes that mark much of the narrative tension of the collection.

2 Delisle begins with the story of Jean Chaulk, her great-grandmother, and ends the book by completing the tale. Between the book-ends are six other lyrical, impressionistic, and episodic vignettes that work together to tell the story of early twentieth-century Newfoundland and her great-grandparents’ generation. Her project, and that of many of those who write second-generation diaspora literature, is to reclaim place and heritage, but in most such cases they are actually constructing an imaginary country to which they can belong.

3 It is a dangerous project that, in less sure hands, has produced the well-worn Newfie-drag fictions, all salt cod, a smattering of Newfoundland English, and a kind of nostalgic outport fetishization. At times Delisle wanders into a laundry list of “old Newfoundland” clichés, but they are brief, and more importantly, they are often tempered and tutored by a larger project of relentlessly, and sometimes ruthlessly, examining her family, their character, and the choices they made. Here, the final story of The Bosun Chair is a good example of trying to understand a woman at once young and heroic aboard a shipwreck and, by turns, hard and pathetic as an aged woman.

4 Perhaps the strongest piece is the second, “Three Thousand Quintals,” a rhythmic near-prose poem balancing several voices: the main character, John Bowering’s poem of his shipwreck, newspaper reports, letters, and the author’s own voice. It has a rhythm and a power that holds the reader, and you can’t believe 24 pages have slipped past while you were in the grips of a perfectly balanced symphony of voices. The next tale is arresting, primarily because that rhythm and storytelling technique is suddenly absent. I blamed the author for a while, thinking perhaps she couldn’t recapture the grace of the first full tale. But each story, while employing a similar set of techniques and storytelling devices, has a distinct quality. Perhaps this is a collection that should be read, one story a night, or maybe one a week, lest you blame the next tale for what it is not trying to be. It is, overall, a worthwhile book that rewards focused attention but does not demand it, that uses several complex narrative techniques but always in the service of the story.

5 If there is a critique, it mostly arises by considering the audience. Newfoundlanders who tell their own stories and read the ones others tell may find — for lack of a better term — the texture of the stories somewhat thin, lacking some nuance and dissonant voices of this imagined home Delisle is trying to recapture. Likewise, we find, once again, that the home and the larger identity of Newfoundland itself are always historically receding, somewhere back there, not here and never now. But I do not want to blame a book for what it never tries to be, and what this book attempts to do is worth the writer’s efforts and the reader’s time.