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