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.

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