Kirjahaku

In math for couples, we re-visit the past to discover our place in the contemporary world. A long-dead father watches his daughter work on her Mac, a woman converses with a photo of her young self. Adele Graf leads us on a journey that is rich and hopeful, evoking powerful nostalgia even if we've never been to the places described. When these poems release us back to our current lives, we feel restored to savour the warmth in a "glad red hat" and the love that arrives "still summer lush."

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."