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buckled into the sky

buckled into the sky

By Adele Graf

Why 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.”

Details

Guernica Editions (Essential Poets Series)

9781771835800

158 pages |

$17.95 USD
$17.95 USD
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Reviews

Replete 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

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Awards

Archibald Lampman Award (Short-listed)

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About the author

Adele Graf grew up outside New York City and immigrated to Canada in 1968. math for couples is her first book of poetry, though more than half these poems have been published in Canadian journals including The Antigonish Review, CV2, The Dalhousie Review, Room and Vallum. She lives in Ottawa.