Bye Bye Blackbird

The poetry of Eileen Berry distills recollection into its essence, and this present collection reminds us once again of how good she is at this. As she plunges into deepest memory, her images are so powerful, we are helpless not to go with her. We are in the house at Marshside, "always cold especially in summer when no fires were lit, and the air felt thin;" we are there in the dry, overheated desert; we are at the funeral when there was "a silence . . . more full than sound." Eileen Berry provides for us a time and place that we did not know but through her unerring pitch and exquisite language, we feel is now ours. Stella Suberman, author of two memoirs published by Algonquin Books, The Jew Store and When It Was Our War This is a wonderfully peculiar collection of poems. It takes the reader back to a set of scenes on a particular English sea marsh in years gone by. And then, the same evocative vocabulary and turn of phrase takes the reader to a suk in the northern Sudan. How these poems, these collective narratives of stories so personal, hold together is marvelous and only possible because they come from the voice of a singular author - Eileen Berry. Dr. Sonia Pérez Villanueva Williams College