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.

Barbara Nickel
is the author of books for young people, including The Secret Wish of Nannerl Mozart and Hannah Waters and the Daughter of Johann Sebastian Bach, which won the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. Barbara is also an award-winning author of poetry for adults; her work has been published in many anthologies and magazines such as The Walrus. She lives in Yarrow, B.C. with her husband and two sons.

Barbara Nickel's profile page

• Short-listed, ReLit Awards - Poetry
• Commended, Quill & Quire Books of the Year

Nickel's handling of rhyme an and line is so textured and subtle...that the structure of the poems, even in such self-conscious patterns, never foregrounds itself, but rather blends seamlessly with subject matter. Nickel, a true poet, understands that the unity of subject and structure is the very definition of form. With this book, Barbara Nickel establishes herself in the first rank of her generation.

Quill & Quire

Nickel continues to press with integrity and invention further into the possibilities that memory, relationships, faith and craft have to offer her art.

Mennonite Quarterly Review

Domain confirms Barbara Nickel's spot among an impressive generation of female poets who write with brassy formal assurance and waste-no-syllable control.

Globe and Mail

Nickel's poems are delicate skeins of associations and allusions, full of evocative sensory detail and striking images...unfailingly graceful.

Toronto Star

Nickel is a master of rhythm and poetic form. Her approach to the sonnet, eclogue, terza rima, blank verse, the triolet, the glosa, and the sestina, show not only her dedication to matching form to content, but also an exceptional ear that remains attuned to notes from her present and her past.

Prairie Fire