"from this sea I am fished, / gutted and stripped, / bled and bound, / on your ship I sail, / or go down." A Lovely Gutting echoes with the music of traditional nature poetry, but its romantic style is ripped by rawness. These poems - enraged and erotic, tormented and tender - swirl around the pain of personal loss, ebbing and surging like the North Atlantic. Durnford pictures a Newfoundland not found in postcards. Her verse roams an island only half-wild, a ramshackle world of crumbling outports and post-industrial landscapes. In one town, the site of a former US Air Force base, stands a crumbling theatre of "piss-stained crushed velvet seats," the ghost of Mae West still lingering. The ocean no longer spits up cod but the view is strangely sublime. A startling collection from a talented new voice in Canadian poetry, A Lovely Gutting splits open the guts of grief. It is an unflinching meditation on the loss of a culture and a father and on the struggle to preserve and honour what remains.

Robin Durnford’s poetry collection A Lovely Gutting was short-listed for the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland & Labrador Heritage & History Award, and her illustrated chapbook, Fog of the Outport (artwork by Meagan Musseau) was the subject of a 2013 CBC Land & Sea documentary. Born in St. John’s and raised on the west coast of Newfoundland, Durnford currently teaches at Grenfell Campus of Memorial University in Corner Brook.

Robin Durnford's profile page

"[Robin] write[s] poetry with such strong lyricism and beauty of phraseology that you feel it hum within you as you read it. Each word is chosen carefully, knowingly, the way a painter might choose a brushstroke, but none of them are the kinds of three-ce

"An economy of language and rhythms that are blunt and consistent, as if her words were beaten out on a drum, establish Durnford's credentials as a nature poet of considerable scope." Susan Walker, The Malahat Review

"Part homage to, part radical disjuncture from the Romantic tradition, A Lovely Gutting unsettles the notion that what no longer remains cannot be revisited, will not emerge from the darkness in 'a delicate splash of sea-light.' Durnford is an important and talented new voice in Canadian poetry, and this collection offers powerful renderings of the wastelands we inhabit and make homes out of." Quill & Quire