More About Herbert Krause Poems and Essays
The Center for Western Studies deserves
our thanks for making available these added
dimensions of one of South Dakota's most
significant writers.
-- South Dakota Library Association's Book Marks
The essays, written between 1939 and
1973, are pleasingly diverse. Whether writing
on literature, the craft of fiction, western
American history, ornithology, or ecology,
Krause sought to set an example for young
western writers and to encourage them "to
speak for the courageous men and women
who struck plow into sod and axe into tree,
flung back obdurate nature, storm and
locust-plague, to raise side-wall and roof-tree
for themselves, their sons and daughters and
their children; with the lantern of faith in
their eyes and the strength of giants in their
hands." -- Western American Literature
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 Benet 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
poetry 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.
