Kirjahaku

Short-listed for the 1999 CLA Book of the Year for Children Award Award-winning poet and playwright Barbara Nickel returns to her Prairie roots in a beautiful collection of seasonal poems that chart, with a bird's-eye view of the western landscape, nature's glorious playground. Nickel's experimental verses are perfectly complimented by Kathy Thiessen's black-and-white etchings, making this ideal for any young Canadian -- Prairie-dweller, would-be poet, or otherwise.

For a time during childhood, the house we live in seems to contain the entire world. Throughout maturity, in a wondrous kind of inversion, the world itself seems to point back to our childhood home. Domain is an elegant, affecting, and focused study of this inversion. These poems are generated, as all verse worth the name is, by an undaunted sense of wonder.The unrestrained fancies of the prodigious young girl inform and feed the mature poet's search for meaning and love in a world where home must be constructed. These poems are rich in detail, grounded in the real, and alive to the music in language. Time takes on an elastic quality as we travel from Czarist Russia to a prairie community to the Change Islands through seasons of loss, grief, renewal, and love. Each room in Domain is a room we've inhabited; Barbara Nickel has brought them to life again.