Looking for God's Country

by Norbert Krapf

Book Overview

Divided into four sections, these new poems describe youthful rites of passage in which death is seen as part of life; follow the German immigrants back to Krapf's ancestral Franconia, the setting of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1568091036
• ISBN13: 9781568091037
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Time Being Books
• Length: 135 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Review by Dan Carpenter of The Indianapolis Star

In half a lifetime of writing history and poetry about the...communities of the Jasper [Indiana] area and their German antecedents, Krapf has shown a sense of place and ethnic identity that radiates out to universal brotherhood....He reminds us of the all-American Walt Whitman, who remained "a part of all that I have met" and of Wendell Berry, who sings of his beloved Kentucky that he has seen the worst and best of humankind there. - Dan Carpenter, The Indianapolis Star

memories and lessons of much-traveled poet

The past often turns up in Krapf's poems, but not in a nostalgic way. The poet does not nostalgically pine for or color the past because it is so lively in his memory anyway. That a "shopping mall and a big/black parking lot" have replaced the packed-dirt basketball court of the poet's youth is not cause for sorrow or regret because when he sees this, the poet hears in his mind "that leather swish/inside a cord net like the sound/of an angel landing in heaven." [from "Barnyard Hoops"] The poet has memories which nothing can take away from him. But these do not pale the immediate or remove the poet from it. Rather, they give fullness and a wide emotional expanse to the present; as when in "Going to Church" two elderly widowers smile and move with a grace that "says ladies they love/are going to church, too." Throughout his life, Krapf has retained his connection to his German ancestry in various ways. This is seen in this volume with black-and-white photographs by the German photographer Andreas Riedel at the beginning of each of the four sections.