Poetry on Brick Street Presents
Poet Norbert Krapf
Poetry on Brick Street will present Norbert Krapf as the featured poet at 6:30 p.m., Thursday June 6, 2013, at Eagle Creek Coffee Company (http://www.eaglecreekcoffee.
On the Work of Norbert Krapf
In half a lifetime of writing history and poetry about the Catholic 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. In Blue-Eyed Grass, his most personal and yet his most magnanimous work, 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
With its emphasis on the specificities of a place and its people, Krapf’s poetry has deep affinities with the local color tradition of American literature. But like Kentucky poet Wendell Berry, Krapf’s forté is in recognizing the spiritual interaction between a people and their place.
John Groppe, Sycamore Review
His poems are of Indiana—the people, the land and the plants. They are sensually rich and wildly accessible. They evoke images as well as smells. And they demonstrate so clearly why he was named, this past June, as Indiana Poet Laureate…This [Bloodroot: Indiana Poems] is a collection to be savored.”
Michael Zimmerman, The Indianapolis Star