Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch [Paperback]

Completed Field Notes begins in the soil, with Robert Kroetsch contemplating a stone hammer that his grandfather discovered on the family farm in Alberta. He first examines the hammer as a physical object, but "Stone Hammer Poem" radiates into history: from the ice age to the Canadian Pacific Railway, through the generations of Kroetsch's family, and back to the stone itself, resting on the poet's desk. That path is a characteristic one for Kroetsch's poetry: he is an earthy writer, and his long poems proceed through exploration of history, family, eroticism, myth, humour, and language itself.

Although Kroetsch is best known as the author of such novels as The Man from the Creeks and the Governor General's Award-winning The Studhorse Man, his early long poems immediately established him as one of Canada's foremost postmodern poets. Completed Field Notes collects all of Kroetsch's long poems, bringing together work originally published from 1973 to 1987 into a volume that he presents (with reservations) as a single, unified work. He has since abandoned the long poem, claiming to have come to "a poet's silence," although he still occasionally publishes shorter lyrics.

Kroetsch is almost unique among experimental writers in that his willingness to take risks makes his poetry relentlessly readable. Completed Field Notes never grows stale or complacent--it is carried swiftly along by Kroetsch's irrepressible sense of play. His wit makes Completed Field Notes a delight. He dramatizes himself as a swaggering, amorous poet, self-mocking enough to get away with a little sentimentality, a keen observer of the world and the foibles of language. Kroetsch's ability to sustain this inventiveness is remarkable, making Completed Field Notes a substantial--and accessible--poetic achievement. --Jack Illingworth --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"[The] reissued What the Crow Said and The Words of My Roaring…honour Kroetsch’s enormous contribution to Canadian literature and…ensure his work will be available to a new generation of readers." University of Toronto Quarterly, Winter 2001/2002, Letters in Canada, vol 71:1

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.

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."

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. He has steadily elaborated his indelible mark on Canadian writing ever since with his fiction, non-fiction, poetry, teaching, and scholarship. He lives in Leduc, Alberta.