Prayer Against Famine and Other Irish Poems

by John Knoepfle

Price 96 pages, $12.95 paper

ISBN 1-886157-45-6

In this moving book of poems, John Knoepfle transforms a search for his Irish roots into a meditation on human suffering and survival. The whole book is a prayer against famine and the gratuitous cruelty inflicted on the innocent, both the Irish of the last century and the Central Americans of today.

Knoepfle makes me picture his mother, beset by the loss of a family she refuses to speak of, smiling her "particular smile," as a kind of "contraband within the cargo of her vexations." I can hear Justina giving witness to a massacre in her Guatemalan village while cheerfully instructing Americans on how to pray, always with a candle so that "the light will sift into every shadow." These are poems of faith that take into account the real world, and make us see it anew. --Kathleen Norris

John Knoepfle is the author or editor of over a dozen books. He is professor emeritus at the University of Illinois-Springfield. His awards include fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Mark Twain Award for Contributions to Midwestern Literature from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, Author of the Year from the Illinois Association of Teachers of English, and the Illinois Literary Heritage Award from the Illinois Center for the Book. He lives in Springfield, Illinois, with his wife, Peggy Sower Knoepfle.

A recorded interview with this author is available from New Letters on the Air.