Former Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf returns to the landscape of his southern Indiana childhood with memories of loss. While facing the death of his second sister from leukemia, he visits the small tomb of his stillborn sister, remembers abuse by his pastor, and laments a brother's disappearance from the family. Being back in Indiana hill country, however, he relives his parents' love of their native place. He reconnects with his German heritage, sites in his ancestral Franconia (northern Bavaria), and the spiritual woods and fields of the Indiana hill country he once roamed. In his hometown to read poems with his Franconian dialect poet friend Helmut, he is moved to hear him read poems in the dialect his parents spoke to one another. Sitting with his Colombian-German-American grandson, four, at his side savoring the German woods "like a little Buddha," he sings a new hymn of praise, "Morning Sylvan Symphony."

Indiana Hill Country Poems is Norbert Krapf’s first collection since the retrospective Bloodroot: Indiana Poems (2008) set almost completely in his native state, except for a few returns in memory to sites in his ancestral Franconia. He has steadily continued to write “Indiana poems” since Bloodroot, but also poems and a prose memoir, Shrinking the Monster, about suffering and recovering from child abuse; an adaptation of his Catholic Boy Blues collection into a play produced through IndyFringe; a collection of poems about his Colombian-German-American grandson Peyton, The Return of Sunshine; and a long prose memoir about the fifty years of his writing life, Homecomings, to appear in 2021. Another issue was finding a publisher willing to take on a collection of poems like Indiana Hill Country Poems. Dos Madres Press answered the call.

To see the Table of Contents and the three sections of poems, 1.”Indiana Hill Country Poetics,” 2.”A Prost to Our Roots,” and 3.”Returning to Lampert’s Woods,” with the titles of all sixty-five poems, click here. This Table of Contents includes links to texts of poems available for viewing on various online sites.

Review on the Indiana Humanities/Glick Indiana Author Awards site