Synopsis "Heimat"
Heimat is an ambitious book-length poetic sequence, by turns funny and witty, tragic and profound, lyrical and narrative. Taking its cues from sources ranging from the great Modernist long poems of the twentieth century to the Asterix comic books and the city of New York itself, Heimat explores what it means to belong to the American nation. At the heart of the poem is the journey of Ernst Lehr, the author's German-speaking great-grandfather who abandoned his family and the Lutheran ministry during World War I to fight for the American Army. He never returned. The book is structured by an awareness of time and our relation to events past and present, both historical and literary, and it uses a virtuosic mix of rhymed and metered verse and free verse in its complex tapestry. Kevin Higgins writes, "Quincy Lehr's Heimat is a sprawling triumph of a poem. In a time when the uptight one-page lyric has achieved something approaching full-spectrum dominance, Lehr challenges contemporary poetic fashions in a most fundamental way. Heimat is a political poem of rare intelligence, daring, and formal rigor. Like The Waste Land, it wanders history and the world-from Battery Park to Dingle in the Kerry Gaeltacht-in search of truths. It is the poem T.S. Eliot might have written if he'd been a disappointed Trotskyist from Oklahoma." Julie Kane notes: "No poet since T. S. Eliot has been able to fuse a panoramic vision of history, a bead on popular culture, a biting satirical intelligence, and a soaring lyrical gift like Quincy R. Lehr. Heimat is Lehr's Waste Land, updated to the present moment where "The modern's 'post-.' The culture's 'multi-' now, / capitalism's shaky, and it's 'late.' / The cast, though, stays on stage, the final bow / has yet to come for this, the nation-state." The sheer scope of this work leaves the rest of us contemporary poets in the red-dirt dust of Lehr's native Oklahoma."
