Completed Field Notes: the Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch - Softcover

Kroetsch, Robert; Wah, Introduction By Fred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0888643500 ISBN 13: 9780888643506

Publisher: University of Alberta Press, 2000

Synopsis

A series of diary entries. Marginalia from Pausanias's description of Greece. A nineteenth century ledger. Postcards from China. What do these ostensibly unrelated things have in common? Little or nothing, except when transformed into verse by Robert Kroetsch, one of Canada's most accomplished writers. Completed Field Notes showcases 20 of Kroetsch's long poems, spanning some 15 years of creative activity.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Heisler, Alberta, Robert Kroetsch published his first novel, But We are Exiles in 1965, and his book The Studhorse Man (1969) won the Governor General's Award for Fiction. Throughout his career, he steadily elaborated his indelible mark on Canadian writing with his fiction, non-fiction, poetry, teaching, and scholarship.

From the Back Cover

A series of diary entries. Marginalia from Pausanias's Description of Greece. A nineteenth century ledger. Postcards from China. What do these ostensibly unrelated things have in common? Little or nothing, except when transformed into verse by Robert Kroetsch, one of Canada's most accomplished poets.

Completed Field Notes brings together 20 of Kroetsch's long poems, spanning some of 15 years of creative activity. Remarkably versatile in both form and content, these extended meditations bear witness to Kroetsch's modernist inheritance and his well-known commitment to postmodern jouissance. Whether it be in an evocation of an Australian beach or in an account of the stone hammer used by the poet's father, we find again and again the delight, elusiveness and mastery of everyday language that have become trademarks of the author's oeuvre.

In "Letters to Salonika" Kroetsch writes: "Time rewrites every book. We try so to construct a book / that time, rewriting, will make it better." This newly typeset edition of the original, with an introduction by poet Fred Wah, has certainly been re-cast by time. But this is not to say that these "field notes" have reached any stage of completion. On the contrary, they will remain open to a new generation of readers-in process, protean, "Kroetschean."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From "Advice to My Friends":

5. Listening to the Radio: For Michael Ondaatje

Morenz makes a breakaway down the ice. He fakes to the left; he draws out to the goalie. He stops. He blushes and says, to all of the Montreal Forum: Emily Carr, I love you.

Everyone is surprised. The puck delays the stick, only the ice moves, The (almost) invisible moment, before he (Morenz) shoots. The goalie's mask in the goal's mouth.

The splendid rigour of his pads. Not the puck in the net but the goalie's mask, moving and stopping. Emily thinks of berry-picking. She wants to sit in the penalty box.

If you eat the berries, she thinks, the pail will never fill. Pay attention to the play, Howie, she whispers across the blue line.

Everyone is surprised. She blushes and says, The wedding will be divided in to three periods of twenty minutes each. Morenz shoots.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Alberta Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0888643500
• ISBN 13: 9780888643506
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 268