"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

"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

"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

"[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