Looking for God's Country

Divided into four sections, these new poems describe youthful rites of passage in which death is seen as part of life; follow the German immigrants back to Krapf's ancestral Franconia, the setting of 26 poems inspired by the photographs of Andreas Riedel; move into settings connected with World War II and a reunited Germany; and return to the poet's origins and reflections on mortality set in his native southern Indiana. As in Krapf's earlier work, family history, nature, and personal relationships, in connection with a sense of place and origins, provide the subject matter for many of the poems.