Overview

that moment / when nothing happens, you want it all to come / back to get you, even the hard stuff — Our increasingly nihilistic age is marked by profound sorrow. We are grieving institutions, art forms, the natural world, our communities – even our very humanity. We are overwhelmed by lives lost to war, violence, genocide, poverty, natural disasters, and disease. We live with the knowledge that a random occurrence could bring an absurd end to any life at any time. In At Beckett’s Grave Robin Durnford gazes at the granite slab marking the resting place of the Irish playwright. In the middle of the ornate tombstones of an overgrown cemetery in Paris, Durnford finds a powerful metaphor in Samuel Beckett – the artist, the exile, the anti-fascist who joined the French resistance. Beckett’s work – and the stark memory of his life – cuts through grandiose self-regard with a razor-sharp message: there is no final meaning. Yet we move forward, regardless. It turns out that the pause — the stage direction central to so many of Beckett’s plays — may be the answer. Grief for an absent loved one never truly ends. Grief itself will never end. Yet, the poetic pause creates space for grief to breathe. During that lingering breath, abiding sorrow carves a path toward hope, one word, one poem, at a time.

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Reviews

""Robin Durnford’s latest poetry collection opens with a newborn and ends, as the title suggests, at Beckett’s grave in Paris. These poems are a conversation, not with the Irish-born modernist playwright himself, but with his texts on absurdity and existence and loneliness. Through the deaths of her parents and the birth of her son, Newfoundland-born Durnford explores home as ‘an assault, pummelled / by one-two punches of hope despair.’ Like Beckett, who refuses to have his body returned to Ireland after his death anticipating ‘an eternal dose of disgust,’ At Beckett’s Grave rails against nostalgia and saccharine notions of belonging, battling against church bells that don’t stop but ‘clang like / god coming at us.’ The bells go on and the granite and wind and fir of home persist. Durnford has crafted a steady stare right through you."" Monica Kidd, author of The Year of Our Beautiful Exile

Author Information

Robin Durnford teaches English literature at John Abbott College and is the author of A Lovely Gutting.

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