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.”

Adele Graf grew up outside New York City and immigrated to Canada in 1968. buckled into the sky is her second poetry book. Her first book, math for couples (Guernica Editions, 2017), was shortlisted for the Archibald Lampman Award. She has also published two poetry chapbooks, a Baltic Friday early in grey (above/ground press, 2017) and Directions to Suffern NY circa 1950 (TREE Press, 2018), which won the TREE Chapbook Award. She lives in Ottawa.

Adele Graf's profile page

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