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“Night has its owl, day its hawk / and every remembering is a forgetting.” With lines like this, Watts intimately intertwines bird life and human wisdom. Her lyrical phrasing either sets us sparrow soaring or places us up to our heron ankles in mud. Through clear storytelling, Watts accompanies us on a quest to understand and accept our humanness. In the music of these poems, we hear the birds’ voices telling us what to listen for. Each poem in The Double Nest is an adventure of flying out, getting lost, and coming home. These are poems to revisit often!

Maureen Buchanan Jones, author of Maude and Addie, and blessed are the menial chores

In The Double Nest, a book of mostly poems in couplet form, Rhett Watts writes the old and new worlds in synch with earth’s quotidian rhythms: dawn, day, dusk, and dark. The poems double as visual and aural, sometimes even swap places, hearing what is seen, like birdsong, beginning with the aubade, “Bird Hours.” “The Double Nest” is also a title poem on the poet’s brother’s death. How does she handle the dark? in the ways we all do, with humor and imagination. In “Cat and Mouse”: “Will I hear my rendezvous approach / Like the tick tock of Captain Hook’s croc, / Or will it arrive torpedo…deep, silent, fast?” Highly recommended!

Donna Fleischer, author of Baby in Space and F L A N E U R

Like the song of the wood thrush that emanates from the dapple light of wooded glades, Watts conveys to us that which by emotion cannot be expressed in ordinary spoken language; wherever you are, wherever you have been, and no matter who you are, you will realize that your journey was not quite so alone. This collection brings nature and poetry together; birds are the backdrops for experiences, moods, times, and places. Her words connect us.

Robert Tougias, author of Birder on Berry Lane and Quest for the Eastern Cougar

Cohorts of birds and mammals cohabit this remarkable and satisfying collection. Pages teem with animal sights and sounds foundational to the poems’ meanings. When a “Cormorant spreads wings like a priest’s arms,” an elegy unfolds. A clockface by M.C. Escher featuring “a chime of wrens winging” hangs majestically in a poem’s mosaic of memories. The Double Nest celebrates the slow work of building a personal relationship with nature. Memories of youthful daring become cautionary tales when advancing years have you “swimming with the crocodiles now.” Solace can come with being “Alone, not lonesome…” Watts beckons us to her side where we, too, can be lovestruck by beauty.

Judith Ferrara, author of A Feast of Losses: Yetta Dine and Her Son, the Poet Stanley Kunitz

Rhett Watts’ The Double Nest, is an ever-deepening meditation on a dazzling array of subjects, on self and the cosmos (“These days I see my body as a planet”), on the inscrutability of nature, on mourning a beloved, on memory, art, and history. What a joy it is, slipping into a poetic sensibility embedded in nature able to give the double experience of precise descriptions of creatures with the immediate subjective responses of the poet. Watts interweaves the two together: “The photograph writes with light / Shutter quick a wings.” If you are looking for a poetic vision that shows the marks of a hard-won wisdom and mature spiritual being, this book is for you.

Marilyn E. Johnston, author of Weight of the Angel, and Downward Dreaming

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