Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany - Softcover

Norbert Krapf grew up in Jasper, Indiana, a German community, and taught, from 1970 to 2004, at Long Island University, where he directed the C. W. Post Poetry Center for eighteen years. He now lives in Indianapolis. A graduate of St. Joseph's College (Rensselaer, Indiana), which awarded him an honorary doctorate, he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in English and American Literature from the University of Notre Dame. His poetry volumes include the trilogy Somewhere in Southern Indiana, Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany, and Bittersweet Along the Expressway: Poems of Long Island, as well as The Country I Come From, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Looking for God's Country, and Invisible Presence: A Walk through Indiana in Photographs and Poems, with Darryl Jones. He is the editor of Finding the Grain, a collection of pioneer German journals and letters from his native Dubois County, and Under Open Sky, a gathering of writings, by contemporary American poets, on William Cullen Bryant. He is also the translator/editor of Shadows on the Sundial: Selected Early Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and Beneath the Cherry Sapling: Legends from Franconia. Winner of the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, he has been a U.S. Exchange Teacher at West Oxon Technical College, England, and Fulbright Professor of American Poetry at the Universities of Freiburg and Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.

Norbert Krapf is a poet-historian. In this volume, Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany, he has undertaken a journey to the land of his Indiana immigrant ancestors. Finding his roots, Krapf enriches his own and his children's lives, and ours, too. --Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame

Norbert Krapf's literary pilgrimage to his ancestral Germany begins and ends in a field of flax, the "blue-eyed grass," whose celestial blooming might have made feudal laborers of the Old World dream of the "blue-sky paradise" across the sea....Whether America...turned out truly to be a paradise for those immigrants is a question his new book doesn't propose to answer. Surely the land of Bach and Cologne has as strong a claim. But neither country escapes this harrowing collection of poems without exposing paradise's flip side. --The Indianapolis Star