A Lovely Gutting (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series)

by Robin Durnford

"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.

98 pages, Paperback

First published February 21, 2012

Reviews

[R · Rating 5 out of 5]

We say not to judge a book by its cover, but I'll admit that I picked this up off my local library shelf and thought it looked pretty interesting. It turns out I was right. The imagery is powerful and complex. The poems are varied in their subjects, yet linked by the language and skill with which they are crafted. This is the first time I've read a collection all the way through in a day, but it was that compelling.

[Caley Brennan · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems perfectly and beautifully capture both the ruggedness of Newfoundland's natural landscape as well as the culture and aesthetics of the region, particularly the west coast and its small communities like Stephenville. The author's grief at the loss of her father also resonates through much of her verse and her poems such as "Polaroid, ca. 1974" are especially heartwrenching. I was actually taking a poetry class in undergrad taught by Dr. Durnford around the time that this book was first published but I really regret not getting around to reading it until now.