Libby Bernardin

Libby Bernardin has published two chapbooks, The Book of Myth (SC Poetry Initiative, 2009) and Layers of Song (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Cairn, Kakalak, Pinesong, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina Yearbooks. She is a Life Member of the Board of Governors of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, and a member of the Poetry Society of South Carolina and the North Carolina Poetry Society. Her poem “Transmigration” was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize.

House in Need of Mooring pulls back the curtain on our natural surroundings and reminds the reader just what is at stake if we destroy our home. To surrender to this book is to face that naked certainty and be moved to action and recognition. —Keith Flynn

[Bernardin’s] luscious, painterly poems find solace in nature; joy and beauty even in grief; simultaneously youthful and wise, and brimming with life; compassionate and unfailingly generous, “scattering seeds/like grain cast/among the famished,” sharing “the god-like immensity of ordinary things.” —April Ossmann

Sample poem from House in Need of Mooring

Marsh

They want for nothing—the blue heron
the snowy egret—salt of their lives
here in the marsh at sunset

This is how it is if you follow the Coopers
Hawk in cold winter air sun crowning head
feathers as it wings away

This is how it is delta wind over cord grass
and black rush how it dries the outstretched wings
of the cormorant earthbound thunderbirds

Here in the marsh mallards skate
to landing The Blue-winged Teal
and the Green-winged Teal scatter

in iridescent color in Six Mile Creek
where sun sketches that last-minute trill
as breezes edge toward December

Fiddler crabs scuttle in tidal wrack even
the White Pelican can be seen near river water
on sand bars gathering against spume

This is how it is when you feel the silky cool rush
of air at your cheek—on the wing in winter
here in the marsh in half-light—day leaving

Praise for House in Need of Mooring

Steeped in the flora and fauna of the South Carolina Lowcountry, the poems of Libby Bernardin immerse us in brackish marshes with their pluff mud, fiddler crabs, and “greedy clams.” The poet steers us to nearby beaches where newly hatched loggerhead turtles “boil from sandy nests.” With her, we “step among moonflowers, listen to tree gossip,” while starkly aware of the “knee on the neck, the god-awful truth of that.” Bernardin is a master of the startling, transformative image. House in Need of Mooring, “a primeval festival of gathering,” grows from a life interwoven with nature, its wisdom earned from the poet’s unflinching observations.

—Ashley Mace Havird, author of Wild Juice: Poems

These poems by Libby Bernardin are keenly sensitive to nature. They also embody the losses, fears, sorrows, loves, and simple pleasures of life lived deeply—a quiet mind seeing, and yes, reflecting, but never looking away from what has gone so wrong and so right in these times. Bernardin’s poems reveal without explaining. They conjure her beloved South Carolina—lowcountry wetlands, city streets and suburbs, mountains, the people and their endeavors—and yet at the same time embrace the unknowable. These poems are a pleasure to read in their rich music and charismatic phrasing, in the way the personal and impersonal play dramatically against each other. In other words, they are moving, disturbing, insightful, and beautiful. This is why you must read them, now.

—Jim Peterson, author of The Horse Who Bears Me Away

Libby Bernardin is a herald of the Natural World and her keen powers of observation and hearing allow her readers to walk through the last coastal forests and “fog-soaked bogs” with a trusted poet as their guide. Thoreau of Walden Pond is her great minister, where “sound brings us to our senses,” and Bernardin’s immaculate sentences are filled with the sonic architecture of “the great crested flycatcher in the loblolly pine,” or “the boar rummaging close to the Atamasco lily” and the ever-changing wind in exquisite symphonies. “If you are in an unjust place,” she writes, you must only “hear sparrows among the pyracantha berries,” to regain your equilibrium. The coyote’s howl is a balm in this world, and the wilderness is not to be feared, but nurtured, experienced, praised, and protected. “The end of my driveway near the salt marsh,” is where the poet lives, she tells us, “where greedy clams whoosh air bubbles.” Nature works with only five polymers, and life builds from the bottom up. “Loggerhead sea turtle hatchlings boil from sandy nests” and “scatter-walk to the sea,” Bernardin affirms, and the arc of Nature, in all its tiny discoveries and cataclysms is where we can find our moral center. House in Need of Mooring pulls back the curtain on our natural surroundings and reminds the reader just what is at stake if we destroy our home. To surrender to this book is to face that naked certainty and be moved to action and recognition, and inside its covers, one need only to “grab the mane, straddle the beast & ride.” 

—Keith Flynn, author of The Skin of Meaning and editor of The Asheville Poetry Review 

Sample poem from Stones Ripe for Sowing

Wisteria

across my street hanging
low among the plum blossoms

lavender racemes—pendulous
and elegant—pea-like orbs

grouped as though grapes
on a stem

Look at the thick vine
clambering clockwise

up the plum tree trunk
taking over blossoms

shaking in wind: fragility
scattered from velvet pods

into poison seeds
How like us, our true selves

deadened by words,
by anger gusting in wind

Praise for Stones Ripe for Sowing

The title perfectly captures Bernardin’s unerring use of metaphor and metaphysical, self-deprecating wit, as does, “Nothing to it,/forgetting yesterday:/I blow it like kisses to past phantoms.” She would never claim to grow flowers from the stones of loss, grief, or vagaries of aging, but she does. Her luscious, painterly poems find solace in nature; joy and beauty even in grief; simultaneously youthful and wise, and brimming with life; compassionate and unfailingly generous, “scattering seeds/like grain cast/among the famished,” sharing “the god-like immensity of ordinary things.”

—April Ossmann, author of Event Boundaries

Libby Bernardin's poems summon a landscape of vivid imagining—her birds, skies, stars, and wind. Yet these are not merely poems of the outer natural world, no matter how beautifully they render it. Stones Ripe for Sewing has immense inner life and displays the power of the poet as seeker, showing us how to “forage in hard and doubtful places.”

—John Lane, author of Anthropocene Blues

Libby Bernardin has crafted a haunting collection from a life well lived and carefully examined. These stunning poems question and affirm while eschewing answers. They invite us to “step into doubt, that hard stone, / seed of spring, of water, of fire.” Firmly grounded in the natural world, Bernardin trains her gaze deep into our very nature and existence, addressing loss and grief, aging, wonder and joy, all the contradictions of our human existence, with language that is at once lyrical and precise. These poems celebrate the every day and the sacred. This is a collection that invites you to become “a new person emerging from this hard case, / a chrysalis with one wing out, trembling.”

—Pat Riviere-Seel, author of Nothing Below but Air