The Shapelessness of Water

The shape and shapelessness of water, of love, of loss. In Cheryl Baldi's lyrical and life-affirming collection, The Shapelessness of Water, four generations spend their summers by the sea. The voice of the poems is the daughter's, who in an attempt to understand her love for and grief over the loss of her mother, imagines her mother's life. Baldi's is a quiet, observant voice, one that is at home, like the poet Mary Oliver, in the presence of the sea. Her life, as was her mother's, is shaped always "by the waves' / refusal to hold their shape." And "[w]hen she dies," this mother asks herself, "will she have left enough of herself?" She has-a legacy of sea and sky, "blue and aching"; the continuity of family; the acceptance of loss and grief as a part of life. And her daughter's legacy? More than "a sadness over what we've lost," Baldi's lovely poems have given us the myriad stages of longing and grief; the shapes of loss and love; and "skin to bone, bone to ash," the ever-changing and eternal shape(lessness) of life.

Julie Cooper-Fratrik

In Cheryl Baldi's The Shapelessness of Water, all of the elements shift and shine. As the shore meets the sea, the speaker's finely tuned lyrical voice pierces through mourning with a revelatory poetry of deep wisdom, and rare emotional reach. Baldi vividly paints the world we recognize-of human connection, sensual pleasure, and activity-while also deftly guiding us to face that shadow world of undertow and beyond in this cathartic new collection.

Ethel Rackin

"So it is with beauty, its refusal / to conceal," writes Cheryl Baldi in these beautiful poems, revealing the heart and scope of a family through several generations with quiet restraint, precise language and radiant intensity of feeling. Baldi's distinctive vision draws its strength in part from her profound and unwavering attention to her kin, portrayed here in their full humanity, as well as to the seaside landscape that has both echoed and accompanied the family through their hardships and rejoicings, that "endless / sweep of blue sky, endless sea // beneath which swells / life unknown and dangerous, / and thriving."

Marcia Pelletiere
About the Author: Cheryl Baldi is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, a former Bucks County Poet Laureate, and a finalist for the Robert Fraser Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared widely in journals, including Bitter Oleander, for which she was a finalist in the 2006 Francis Locke Memorial Award and Salamander, which nominated her work in 2008 for the Best New Poets anthology. She served on the faculty of Bucks County Community College for 25 years teaching writing and literature, has worked as a free-lance editor, and served as co-facilitator for community based workshops exploring women's lives through literature. She lives with her husband in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.