Last year, longtime Roslyn resident Norbert Krapf left the area to return home to Indiana. But he hasn't stopped writing poetry. This year, Krapf has published his 13th book of verse, Looking for God's Country, published by Time Being Books.

The book includes many poems on familiar themes, most of them based in either the southern Indiana of Krapf's boyhood or in the German countryside of his ancestral country.

In addition, the book's prologue, "Letter from a Star Above Southern Indiana," was written for that state's Hoosier Millennium Celebration, specifically at the request of Frank O'Bannon, the former governor of Indiana.

The book's Indiana poems celebrate aspects of small town and rural life, including fishing, hunting, gardening, and that great Indiana pastime, basketball.

As with the Indiana poems, the German poems are often about family life. The German poems in Looking for God's Country also explore the more tragic side of recent German history. "Empty Underground Shelves" is about book-burning at a German university in the early 1930s, while a longer poem, "Wurzburg Sequence: After Gunter Ullrich" describes the Allied bombing raids of civilian targets, including churches, that took place in the waning days of World War II.

Yet another poem, "Dark and Deep" has nothing to do with either Indiana or Germany, but instead, as the title suggests, is a play on the famous Robert Frost poem, "Stopping by Woods On A Snowy Evening." In fact, the poem was written for a book, Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by The Life and Work of Robert Frost, published this year by University of Iowa Press.

Finally, the book closes with a poem, "The Time Has Come" which explains the author's reasoning for leaving an unspecified place (Long Island) for home, in this case, Indiana.

During his time on Long Island, Krapf has written about Roslyn, most specifically in his 2000 book, Bittersweet Along The Expressway, which has poems about Cedarmere, downtown Roslyn, and as the title suggests, traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

Krapf currently lives with his wife in Indianapolis. Last year at this time, as he was set to leave Roslyn for the Hoosier State, Krapf marked the occasion by giving a reading at Cedarmere, the home of William Cullen Bryant.

It was a fitting way to say goodbye to the area. One of Krapf's many books published during the past three decades was Under Open Sky, an edited collection of essays on Bryant.

Krapf moved to Long Island in the early 1970s, to teach at C.W. Post University. After a year of teaching, he began writing poetry, something he hadn't planned on doing. Krapf wrote his dissertation on the famed American poet Robert Lowell, and throughout the years, he has not, unlike other poets, taught creative writing, but instead he has stuck to teaching literature and also directing C.W. Post's poetry center.

As is the case with many artists, living far from his roots gave Krapf the needed perspective to write about southern Indiana, the area of the Hoosier State where he grew up. "Being uprooted [from Indiana] had something to do with it," Krapf said of the unexpected desire to write poetry.

Krapf also has a German ancestry. In the 1988-89 school year, Krapf, while teaching under a Fulbright fellowship, spent time in the Franconia region of that country, a place, that he soon discovered, was home to both of his parents' families.

Whether writing about southern Indiana or Germany or even suburban Long Island, the concept of roots is important to Krapf. "It remains an obsession," he admits.

While serving as director of the poetry center at C.W. Post, Krapf has helped to organize an annual Poetry Awards reception at the university. Now in its 39th year, the awards have included appearances by guest poets. Included in their number have been such luminaries as Richard Wilbur, Stephen Spender, Joyce Carol Oates, Galway Kinnell and Robert Morgan.

Although the old Long Island produced Walt Whitman, today's suburbia is more likely to spawn television sitcom personalities rather than men of letters. Still, as Krapf said in his 2004 interview with The Roslyn News, there is a lot of "vital poetry" being produced on the Island. He cited a poetry journal, Long Island Quarterly, plus public readings at the Book Revue in Huntington and other destinations.