Poems and essays of Herbert Krause

When Herbert Krause won the Friends of American Writers' Award in 1939 for the powerful "Wind Without Rain", his career as a major novelist was launched. Stephen Vincent Bene't pronounced him "one of our essential novelists." With that best seller and a second in 1946, "The Thresher," Krause established himself as the historian of Pockerbrush, the hilly lake country of west-central Minnesota, and the hard life and harsh religion of the German homesteaders there. Now his poettry and essays have been brought together for the first time in a collection that reveals at last the full extent of his accomplishment. Krause's poems range from sparse lyrics reminiscent of Robert Frost (one of his mentors) to rustic dialogues, to sad laments about lost youth and lost opportunity. The essays, even fuller in variety, present the literary critic, the comic commentator, and above all the sensitive and poetic naturalist and environmentalist, penetrating the Black Hills or dizzied by the tracery of geese in motion. Illustrated.