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It’s a matter of knowing winter. Snowbird travels south, seeks warmth, and begins waiting. Robert Kroetsch’s new collection, The Snowbird Poems, is a brilliant flight of departure. Beached where he watches a drowning horizon, teased by romance, Snowbird lets his responses become a message in a bottle to the lost and for the found. Appearing at first wearing bifocals and drinking from a fake coconut, Snowbird goes on to retrieve the footprint of story from the ocean of memory. ... Read more

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An impressive anthology of the poetry
The Snowbird Poems is an impressive anthology of the poetry of Canadian literary icon Robert Kroetsch. There is the matter of the crabapple tree./There it stands, wintering, you might say,/in the small front yard/between the veranda and the sidewalk.//Snow, you may have noticed, has seated itself/in the two wicker chairs on the veranda./As for the sidewalk,/we'll get to that in a moment.//The crabapple tree appears to be posing/for a woodcut, possible by Hiroshige,/his Japanese trees precise, angular, yet graceful/in their delicate tracings of snow.//But this is a January morning/on 18th Avenue SW, Calgary./I have just now shoveled the sidewalk/for the fifth time in the past three days.
... Read more

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This volume presents Robert Kroetsch's long poems, including "The Ledger", "Seed Catalogue," "Advice to My Friends," and "Excerpts from the Real World." Featuring an illuminating new introduction by poet Fred Wah. ... Read more

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The University of Alberta Press is pleased to issue this new edition of the classic Canadian novel, What the Crow Said, a major work by one of western Canada's best-known and best-respected authors. ... Read more

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Too weird to put down...
I had to read this for my 20th century lit class.Just read the first 2 pgs, and you'll know what I mean by weird.But strangely enough... i couldn't stop reading once I got a little ways in.So many weird things happen that you just want to know how it ends.A strange, twisted, interesting book. ... Read more

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In 1916, scientist William Dawe leads a palaeontological expedition into the badlands of Alberta, obsessed with achieving world renown by discovering dinosaur fossils. Fifty years later, his daughter, Anna, enters these same badlands. In her visit to the expedition site, she exposes not only the absurdity of her father's work, but also the folly of his male ambition. ... Read more

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Another no-talent hack gets published. And what else is new?
The Badlands is a terrible book. It alternates from boring the reader to making them cringe at the pathetic attmepts Kroetsch makes at creating patterns, meanings and symbols that transcend character and place. This is the kind of junk that young hacks churn out in creative writing class, and it also seems like it was written with academia in mind. It has all the requirements to meet an English Lit. course's criteria; it can be picked apart and would serve to teach students about different techniques and literary devices, although they could (and should) learn from much, much better authors. This book is dangerous and it sucks, while most books in Canons of literature don't. Also, the devices used to give significance to events are so blatantly out in the open it's as if he just threw together these elements with no concern for story whatsoever- going by the guidelines of one of thse "how to write fiction" books, as it were. (By the way, you should avoid those books at all costs if you're serious about being a writer...they homogenize your vision of the world and inhibit your originality, and you'll end up writing junk like Badlands.)

How this got rave reviews I don't know- how it even got published is a mystery to me. The author seems to be lacking any sort of warmth and understanding of humanity; his characters are flat and don't act as human beings would. This is probably the work of a cold pseudo-intellectual who thinks the world revolves around him and has no concern or compassion for his fellow humans. Considering how the protagonist of this novel is a man who fits that description, I wouldn't be surprised if Kroetsch is what I've pegged him to be. Either that, or he's just a hack who got a lucky break. Maybe he knew the right people, or paid them off, or he slept with the publisher or something.

Not a rewarding book. If you have to read this, I feel for you. If not, avoid at all costs! ... Read more

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"I was electioneering. By God, people were listening. People were looking my way. And some joker with his arse begining to ache from sitting too long on a nail had to clear his throat and chip in, "Backstrom, what have you got to offer?" I looked at the speaker and saw he was a farmer and I said, "Mister, how would you like some rain?"A new edition of another classic from one of Canada's most enduring novelists. ... Read more

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A great read
Robert Kroetsch's book is a classic novel of the depression and the rise to power of 'Bible Bill' Aberhart's Social Credit in the Alberta Legislature.But it's more than that -- it is truly Canadian literature, evoking in poetic terms both the prairies and the lushness of southern Ontario, and the multicultural nature of the Canadian people.

One of RK's most underrated novels
I got to proofread this book for the U of A Press and met the author on several occasions. The experience convinced me to stay in publishing.

Kroetsch is a warm, interesting man with a fantastic ability to tell a story. His character, Johnnie Backstrom, makes meaningful but unfortunate mistakes. The miracle of this novel is that you identify with him from page one. The couleur locale, moreover, is priceless.

Incidentally, the cover painting is a by a relatively famous Canadian painter, as are most U of A books. This is a beautiful, readable edition of a novel that the Torontonians, in their infinite wisdom, let slide out of print. What muckie-mucks.

Uproarious
At its best, Kroetsch's fiction is impossible to resist. The present volume is no exception. The author beautifully evokes every detail of dusbowl Alberta, from rusty old Chevs to rodeos to farmer's daughters. As Johnny backstrom's campaign picks up speed, we watch a man transformed by hucksterism and inflammatory rhetoric. needless to say, parallels to our own politicians are everywhere apparent. But this novel is primarily a yarn, like all of Kroetsch's novels. It bounds along like a prairie school bus--solid, loud, colorful and true. ... Read more

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In this re-examination of the work of Robert Kroetsch, who has been hailed as one of the fathers of post-modernism, Dianne Tiefensee argues that Kroetsch's "deconstruction" fails to address, or even comprehend, the radical nature of Derrida's theory. Tiefensee contends that Kroetsch and his critics have, to some degree, misunderstood the implications of Derrida's "deconstruction" and adhere to a Bloomian "misreading" which is firmly grounded in traditional philosophy. She addresses the metaphysical presuppositions that govern Kroetsch's criticism, literary theory, and novels and considers the extent to which his theoretical pronouncements have determined his critics' readings of his work, concluding that Kroetsch reaffirms the very values, conventions, and attitudes he claims to resist. ... Read more

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The voices of other novelists, poets, and critics participate in this series of conversations&#151they agree or disagree, illustrate or elaborate on Robert Kroetsch&#146s own words as he talks about literary influence, the importance of game theory in literature, the uses of myth, and approaches to narration&#46

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Contents: Biocritical Essay by Aritha van Herk; Archival Introduction by Jean F Tener; Abbreviations; Archival Inventory; General Index. ... Read more

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Seven poets of diverse region, gender, sexual orientation, race, and generation. Seven poets linked by experiment and opposition. Robert Kroetsch discusses postmodernism's history, Fred Wah talks about ethnic hybridity, and Dionne Brand muses on postcolonial struggle and community. Erin Mouré encourages "excessiveness" while Daphne Marlatt speaks of "salvaging". On writing, poetics, and culture, Marie Annharte Baker and Jeff Derksen share their personal perspectives and experiences. Poets Talk brings new insights to the value of inspiration, imagination, and poetic re-invention. ... Read more

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Wish They Were Here
What a terrific book, and one that should be more widely known on this side of the border, for even though all the poets and both the interviewers are Canadians born and bred, the questions they address are ones that we need to listen to, and very few of us here in the USA are bothering with their construction or phenomenological coming into being.The two interviewers sometimes act as a tag team, and at other times (like Charlie's Angels) split up for more effective coverage and/or investigation.For example, on her own Susan Rudy interviews Fred Wah, perhaps because her partner, Pauling Butling, is married to Wah and maybe wouldn't be unbiassed or something?Although Rudy also shares a certain I don't know, easy familiarity with Wah that makes reading their interview sort of like listening to close country cousins kibbitz.

The book begins with a very intense interrogation of Robert Kroetsch, the venerable postmodernist about whom Rudy has written a whole volume already.Kroetsch notes that some people think he's gone too far (outside of grammar) in his "Poem for My Dead Sister," but Butling seems to scoff at such a notion, instead egging him on to prove that his work is any more difficult than, say, Gertrude Stein's.He is forced to quote individual lines from his poem and insist on their opacity, while Rudy and Butlingmurmur in the background about "Yes, you certainly make it incomprehensible in the reading, or first reading," and a certain skepticism pours through, especially in regards to Kroetsch's gender values, which are mystifying.Good work all around!I don't think that Kroetsch IS indeed as well known in the USA as the editors state in their preface to this interview, despite his having taught at Binghamton for decades.But then again, I'm o expert.

Their interview with Daphne Marlatt is equally focussed: this time they examine Marlatt's book SALVAGE, in which she digs up some of her own work and re-writes it, teasing out the threads of lesbian identity and politics that an earlier discretion or unknowing led her to obfuscate.They seem in general admiring of Marlatt's progress, although they leap at her use of the neologism "Stanzagraph."PAULINE: "What do you mean by stanzagraph?"Good question, for Marlatt was trying to let it slip by as though everyone in the world knew what a stanzagraph is.To me, it's one of those words that didn't need to be, but as Marlatt describes why she came to use it, my sympathies grew as her discourse became more intimate.Maybe that's the secret of all good interviews, they let the person come out more, the figure behind the poem.Though this is exactly what Erin Moure dislikes about interviews, as she admits, and throughout her interview she seems panicky, as though losing part of her heteronymity through having to sit still for an hour while Butling and Rudy try to pin her down.

Pauline Butling's talk with Jeff Derksen ends so abruptly I wondered if one or the other of them had to run out to put money in a parking meter.Also, it is ironic that apparently the University of Alberta couldn't afford a proof-reader to clear up some of the spelling in the book, ironic especially when the black poet Dionne Brand reproves Butling and Rudy (and all white critics and poets) for not knowing enough about black American writers, including Gayl Jones, and then the book misspells Jones' name, as though to underline the point.

But all in all a splendid edition and one longs, not for a sequel, but for a whole encylopedia of Butling and Rudy just talking about anything. ... Read more

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This book undertakes a detailed reading of Robert Kroetschs The Studhorse Man [1969], examining this Canadian novel in its transnational historical and socio-cultural context. Key subject headings are biology and culture, sex and gender, eugenics and contraception, writing and reading. The overarching theme is disenchanted modernity in the twentieth-century, the systematic displacement of the divine and natural order by a humanly ordained social regime, and by forms of social engineering that brought to bear the full force of modern science, invasively to alter the most fundamental conditions of human life. The more immediate literary frames of reference are Greek mythology, early Christian debates on the body and marriage, and the lore of the North American Aboriginal trickster, as these are deployed and alluded to in Kroetschs novel. In establishing the sources and contexts of The Studhorse Man, this study examines Robert Kroetschs early drafts of the novel, and his many notes taken and clippings assembled during its composition.An effort has been made to appeal to a wide range of general and academic readers alike by avoiding specialized jargon and adopting a cross-disciplinary approach. This book will be of interest to scholars of literature and literary theory, and of use in courses on literature and the novel, on masculinity and gender studies, and on cultural history in the twentieth century. ... Read more

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Jeremy Sadness is a professional grad student of New York State University who heads out for the wilds of northwestern Canada to work out his inadequacies. ... Read more

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A Likely Story recounts the writing life of Robert Kroetsch, one of Canada's foremost writers and literary theorists. With incisive wit, humor and penetrating insight, Robert Kroetsch follows the events of his life, both real and literary, that have moved him from the bareness of desk and computer into the secret places at the heart of the writing experience. Throughout this chronicle, he toys ironically with the notion that he ceases to be himself when he writes, that writing allows him to escape from the confines of self into exciting varieties of the essay, story and poem.A Likely Story records in loving detail that escape. It is a remarkable assemblage of confessional personal essays, one of the principal elegiac poems of out time, a cowboy poem and speculative pieces that defy literary classification. Through them all Robert Kroetsch enters the landscape of recollection, discovery, delight, self-deception, play, grief and revelation, and through them all he insists with customary boldness: "I am attempting to write an autobiography in which I do not appear." ... Read more

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This collection of essays by a distinguished Canadian novelist, poet, and critic concentrates on the age-old act of storytelling and its significance to individuals and society in Canada.The essays, some never before published, examine such issues as silence, violence, and eroticism in the works of Sinclair Ross, Malcolm Lowry, Margaret Lawrence, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, and Willa Cather. They also deal with the long poem in relation to the uncertainty of the modern storytelling impulse, the criticism of Northrop Frye, the Canadian writer and the American literary tradition, women in Prairie fiction, nationalism and literature, and Canadian literary strategies. ... Read more

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In this series of penetrating essays Simone Vauthier, Professor Emeritus at the University of Strasbourg, examines our most successful genre through sophisticated, intensive explorations of the craft, themes, and techniques of several of Canada's leading short story writers: Norman Levine, Alistair MacLeod, Leon Rooke, Audrey Thomas, John Metcalf, Clark Blaise, Carol Shields, Rudy Wiebe, Hugh Hood, and Mavis Gallant. ... Read more