Half Rock

“Sick for the language nan speaks,” Robin Durnford’s poems pursue the “dervish verbs” of a torquey local idiom, their punchy rhythms and visceral imagery invoking a sort of barbaric yawp for Newfoundland’s south coast. Whether she’s writing of childbirth, family lore or teenage shenanigans, her work is rooted, her “tongue still twists / in the deserted weeds of barren banks / for recitations, caribou, heroic deeds, and blessèd / fishing coast I cannot leave.”