Bøger af Barbara Nickel

music, Nannerl Mozart, Wolfgang, family, sibling rivalry, sister, brother

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.

Late in her life, acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Delamere makes a request of her therapist, Doctor Newman: she asks him to oversee the publication of her last book after she dies. It is a memoir in which she reveals that she is Evelyn Dick, the notorious ""torso murderer"" acquitted on appeal of dismembering her husband, and convicted of killing her infant son. In 1958 she was paroled, and disappeared into the mists of history. In Blue Moon, James King draws on the historical case of Evelyn Dick, and imagines her life after her release from prison. It is a life in which she travels to Vancouver, renames herself, and settles into a position as sales clerk at Duthie Books on Robson. There she meets Ethel Wilson, begins therapy, and tries to understand the events that led to her imprisonment and current life. She also begins to write, and finds herself a successfully published author. But did she murder her husband? Is she guilty of neglect of her baby boy? Was her life as Hamilton's most notorious prostitute her responsibility? With the help of Doctor Newman, she attempts to come to understand the violence in which she was involved, her sense of guilt, and the essential truth of her innocence.

Taking the name of a nervous system disorder that causes involuntary shaking, Essential Tremor undertakes an exploration of the body that holds disruption at its heart. The captivating and timely poems in Essential Tremor attend to many bodies--the body of the world, changing, unreachable, at times momentarily illumined; the human body, loved, ill, mourning, passing or passed from this world; and the divine body, questioned, encountered and not, sought by people from the margins in the body of a biblical palimpsest. In her third collection, award-winning poet Barbara Nickel blends sonnets in sequences and scattered stand-alones with more formal innovations and extensions--erasures of the notes accompanying da Vinci's anatomical drawings, lines found from Beethoven's autopsy, and the musings of poet isolating in the midst of a twenty-first-century pandemic. Nickel asks her readers to consider the many facets of the body, how it finds the words, lines and poems that together form an essential life, a gift among our deepest wounds and terrors.