THE NEST

I had the awesome opportunity in July 2023 to illustrate the cover of a book! This brilliant collection of poems The Nest by Christine Redman-Waldeyer is NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.COM!

I know you will love it as much as I do…it is a fast-paced, creative account of some of the author’s life observations and memories. It is very entertaining, quirky, sometimes funny, sometimes dark… it WILL spark strong visuals…a film in your brain as you read her words. It will drive you to want to stop and smell the roses (or perhaps bird watch).

After reading The Nest, you may even feel compelled, like I was,to write poems about your own experiences!

The cover illustration (featuring the silhouette of a paper-white ink stippled gray catbird) mirrors the stirring lines of The Nest in tones, colors and imagery mentioned throughout the book: the author’s experiences, observations, inspired thoughts and creative flow of ideas transform into lines of words - poetry - then released and shared into the world like seeds in springtime, sparks of light at night and grains of sand scattered during a storm.

Reviews of The Nest!

"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