Cormorants at Dusk

With elegance and grace, the spellbinding poems of Cheryl Baldi's Cormorants at Dusk, reveal the ebbing and flowing of grief and memory inherent in mourning. Exquisite imagery and

delicate tonal shifts create a place of timeless transformation. Through attention to migratory and oceanic cycles, the poet seeks solace from her sister's absence in the seaside world they shared. Resistance to 'moving on' from this loss opens into the astonishing discovery of her sister's return in the herons, grasses, cockles, and squalls of "the shoals of [their]island/deep into the sky." A haunting and unforgettable collection.

-J.C. Todd, author of Beyond Repair

Located among the salt creeks and bayscapes of the Jersey shore, pulsing with the arrivals and departures of bird life and tides and planets, these poems face both the pain and the radiance of loss. Cheryl Baldi knows as well as any poet what Frost meant when he said "poetry is about the grief." Like the title's cormorants attendant upon her sister's passing, throughout this collection memory perches upon moments recalled in the abiding light of a shared communion with the mysteries of a mutual world. Baldi's voice and language are washed clean of pretense, as driftwood, taut, sinuous, and true, so reading these poems is if anything a sacramental experience, bringing us closer to an inmost self that is both of us and beyond.

-Terence Culleton, author of A Tree and Gone



Cormorants at Dusk recounts the loss of a beloved sister; but this is not an ordinary retelling of grief that weighs on the reader. This collection is quiet as the wings of the many birds roosting in its poems. Pinpoint images detail life as the sister's death looms-a "counter scattered with crumbs from half eaten sandwiches." These perfect images continue, imbuing all of nature with the process: cormorants keep watch "in their black robes," the sister's ashes drift into salt creeks, and a spider returns to her "porch above the light she always left on." It is as if the departed one continues to light the speaker's way. Here there is grace, a blessed memory, and a gift for the reader.

-Jane Edna Mohler, author of Broken Umbrellas