The Sign of the North

Wisconsin is the American Dairyland, a country of corn, potato, cranberry, and ginseng. The bluegrass, the tornadoes and the Northern Lights, together with the singular beauty of the nature and its harsh climate, create a unique philosophy in the Wisconsin people. They have a deep understanding of life, a mind of firm certitudes, a warm heart fed by a family of three to five children, a special sense of humor, and a solid discipline of hard work. Many poems of this book are inspired by my years spent in Wisconsin and I dedicate it to the great hearts of the people that I was blessed to meet there. They became a luminous part of my life. - Horia Ion Groza
Horia Groza is surprising for a plant breeder who by nature ought to be entirely realistic and uncompromising when the issue is beauty, truth, love of little things. DIFFERENT... Horia is DIFFERENT. True, he loves the potato for it is a good thing to love, but he loves also the tender, the small, the seldom seen. This is a blessed state. I shall end there... for the purpose of life of gentles and giants is to arrive at the Blessed State. Poetry is a potato fork. I have several. With a fork you feel the earth, feel gravity, feel the lifting, feel the worms, feel the soil, feel the sweat, feel the tilth. And if you are like Horia and me, feel the godliness of the potato. This book of poems by Horia is not the monster Lenco, instead a potato fork. Poetry equipped with a short handle to feel the gravity of our lives, its worms, its tilth. A forkful at a time, digging is necessary, and in the lifting, to feel the earth's desire. These words of this potato researcher I'm so honored to know and call friend. - Justin Isherwood, Author of Book of Plough, Essays on the Virtue of Farm; of Family & Rural Life; and of Pulse, A Farmer's Take on the Universe.
Horia came from the East -- you could say from behind the curtain. He brought passion for freedom and justice emboldened by the belief in higher good. Medicine was not an option so the science of agriculture and potato became his vocational pursuit. In our time to know him, Horia chose to invest uniquely in what he could offer; not limited by distance, living almost nine years more than half a continent away from his beloved Joanna, we learned about the culture and faith that supported Horia as he invested knowledge, sweat and practice into our fledgling program of potato breeding. And there were also the weekly afternoon tennis matches with the club! While the potato program continues on to international recognition, more significant is that we became friends and family and brothers in the faith.- Bryan Bowen, Director of Agronomy, Black Gold Farms; former Associate Researcher at University of Madison-Wisconsin and Superintendent of Rhinelander Agric. Research Station.