Barbara Nickel

Domain Barbara Nickel

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.