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 mystery of child becoming adult. We share the fears and joys of a questioning youth through prose and poem, the longing and yearning to deal with the past laid out clearly before us. The repetitive storyline brings us deeper and deeper into the memories of her youth and how those memories continue to shape her as a poet, mother, daughter, wife, and the grown child.
—Mary-Jane Grandinetti, Editor of Shot Glass Journal and The Fib Review
Christine Redman-Waldeyer’s The Nest contains poetry of confessional insight and narrative that inhabits a world that succeeds in blurring the personal with the natural that surrounds the poet’s life and history. It is in the natural world where Redman-Waldeyer findings the most enduring capacity to deal with the pain, the joy, and the life she inhabits and in so doing, offers the reader to consider the same pathway to understanding what life has to offer.
—R.G. Rader, Publisher, Muse-Pie Press |
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| Author BIO |
| Christine Redman Waldeyer |
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An Associate Professor of English at Passaic County Community College, Christine's publications and experience include writing for magazines and newspapers. Her work has been included in the following journals such as Caduceus Magazine, Catalyst Book Press, Contemporary American Voices: a journal of poetry, Exit 13, Lips, Mom Egg Review, Paterson Literary Review, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Seventh Quarry, Shot Glass Journal, The Texas Review, Verse Wisconsin, among others. She has also been featured in Fjords Review, Literary Mama and Pink.Girl.Ink Press. Poetry books include "Eve Asks," "Frame by Frame," and "Gravel" (Muse-Pie Press). She is Co-Editor of Writing After Retirement: Tips from Successful Retired Writers," (Rowan and Littlefield, 2014), Founder and Editor of Adanna Literary Journal, a women focused journal and has earned her doctorate with a concentration in creative writing at Drew University. She is certified in in Educational Leadership: Community College Leadership Initiative (CCLI), Rowan University and resides at the Jersey Shore.
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| Other Publication By Christine Redman Waldeyer |
Christine Redman Waldeyer
ISBN: 9789390202430
Christine Redman-Waldeyer
ISBN: 9788119228782
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