Description
Book SynopsisWhy do we travel the world to discover where home really is? Even if we find it in the place we started from, is it ever really the same? In buckled into the sky, Adele Graf routes our search for home through ancestors in their own country and family who settled abroad.
Yet it's only after travel that we're drawn to "zigzag back" to our "pillared front door" — whether that's our current home, our childhood home, our mind's home, our home in the world — or all of these at once. We'd left home, had even ignored our "house with its blue shutters," because, as these vivid and tender poems assure us, "it will always be there."
Trade ReviewReplete and vibrant with detail, the poems of Adele Graf's buckled into the sky transport the reader on physical and emotional journeys, evoking landscapes of Canada with more distant locales of Greece, Latvia and elsewhere. It is also a book of memorial, where the poet conjures the profound stories of her familial history and pays tribute to those unsung relatives now lost to tragedy and time, offering a generous, compassionate hand to the past through her assured, graceful lines. -- David O'Meara
In these probing poems Adele Graf journeys to Latvia, site of a family's trauma during the Holocaust, then on to Greece, Switzerland, Atlantic Canada and beyond before arriving home again. Every place along the way becomes a "charged landscape". Every life leaves its "brief signature" in our imaginations. buckled into the sky is book of passages that sweeps us along. -- Deanna Young, Ottawa Poet Laureate
