In this collection, which includes "Fire and Ice," winner of the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Norbert Krapf returns to the settings and themes of his highly regarded Somewhere in Southern Indiana. A writer for whom place has been a major inspiration, Krapf continues his exploration of family history, relationships between people of different ethnic backgrounds, nature, and the passage of time. He extends his meditations on the Holocaust (included in Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany, published in 1997) to the treatment of the Miami Indians of his native region and a racial incident from his college years. The title echoes a line from Midwestern songwriter Bob Dylan, the subject of a tribute; refers to the poet’s native Indiana, the American Heartland and the United States as a whole; and evokes a mythic homeland.

Norbert Krapf grew up in Jasper, Indiana, a German community, moved to Long Island in 1970, and has since taught at Long Island University. A graduate of St. Joseph’s College (Rensselaer, IN), 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. 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.

Krapf’s 18 books include the trilogy Somewhere in Southern Indiana: Poems of Midwestern Origins, Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany, and Bittersweet Along the Expressway: Poems of Long Island. He is also the editor of a collection of German immigrant journals and letters from southern Indiana, Finding the Grain, and the editor/translator of Shadows on the Sundial: Selected Early Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and Beneath the Cherry Sapling: Legends from Franconia.

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