Author Description

Christine Redman-Waldeyer’s deeply moving poetry collection enraptures with powerful images and precise detail. The image of the nest is explored through poems that circle back and forth between childhood, adulthood, relationships and familial history. The speaker is the young girl in pigtails, the granddaughter of an immigrant grandmother, the adolescent in love, the adult whose elderly mother struggles with illness, the poet who records and remembers hungers and disappointments, beauty and loss. These poems, highly personal and universal, are filled with longing, evoking the pleasures and pain of leaving the nest, only to return again and again. —Nancy Gerber, author of The Kingdom of Childhood: Poems and Losing a Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Caregiving The Nest is a beautiful and wondrous collection of poems where the poet skillfully tells her personal story in a deep and honest way. As Redman-Waldeyer invites us to join her seaside journey from childhood to womanhood, the reader is compelled to identify with familiar snapshots as witness to the poet’s life experiences. The metaphor of the nest with its perfect cup-like architecture, symbolizes the endurance and strength and love and discipline— as the family unit survives, even with all its challenges. There is self-recovery through the realization that “The past is bait for the soul/ we fish in the tide water/ wader pants to keep us dry while the water drowns/ our sorrows, our joys, our mistaken ken.” Even through it all, the family deaths, the yard sales, life’s complexity of putting one foot in front of the other, there is a letting go. Still, the poet lifts her face to the sun—“There is the promise of the next sunrise/the promise of the crane/who stands just close enough to our buckets.” —Deborah Gerrish, author of Indeed Jasmine Christine Redman-Waldeyer transports us to a past life, looking at the world through the eyes of innocence. Her poems are deep-seated in the myst