Somewhere in Southern Indiana: Poems of Midwestern Origins

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Robert Morgan

In these poems Norbert Krapf makes a place in Southern Indiana settled by Franconian ancestors the center of his world and very close to the center of ours. You cannot read them without being moved. — winner of the Southern Poetry Review prize, author of the poetry collection At the Edge of the Orchard Country and Watershed: Novellas and Stories

Lucien Stryk

Norbert Krapf has been writing strong poems about the things that most matter for some years, and it is fine to see them together in collections. He is one of the best of the poetswho have emerged in recent years, and the publication of his work is cause for celebration. — editor of Heartland II: Poets of the Midwest, winner of the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Award, author of Collected Poems 1953 - 1983

David Ignatow

Norbert Krapf is blessed with the haunting beauty of his childhood and youth in rural Indiana. Family and friends crowd upon him, gentle man and women, hard working farmers straight out of gracious but impoverished Germany of the Nineteenth century. They are his roots in being, and he pays them deep, discerning love and gratitude for who they were and are to him still, strengthened in himself as man and poet because of them. Somewhere in Southern Indiana should be read on a quiet evening, joining Norbert Krapf in his memories of the once living, who handed on to him their spirit and sustaining love with which he was raised to carry on unto the generations yet to come. It is a book of rural psalms.  — winner of the Bollinger Prize in Poetry, author of Six Decades: Selected Poems 1934 - 1994

James R. Stefanie

What Charles Olson called proprioceptivity is a dominant factor in Krapf as a poet: a sense of surroundings. By this I mean Krapf always knows his place in his poems, whether the space he inhabits is a room, a landscape, a city, or a thought or feeling. He usually stays in the center of things, not as a voice so much as an eye, a roving eye. His detail, his accuracy and clarity, and his centeredness, make for a poetry of persuasion. The result is a sureness that the reader catches.  — publisher of Sparrow Press, author of the poetry collections A Fig Tree in America and East River Nocturne

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