Robert Kroetsch

"Poet Rita Kleinhart disappeared from the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt on June 26, 1992 at age fifty-five. She has not been seen alive since. All that remains of Rita are mounds of poems: finished, unfinished, and unfinishable." "But where has Rita gone? As her "intimate friend" Raymond sorts through the papers in her abandoned ranch house, the "fragments after a fragment" whirl and dissolve into a mystery, a romance, a primer, a fiction."--BOOK JACKET.

In this new collection of twelve stories, one of our most admired writers evokes the longing we feel for beauty in our relationships with one another, with the past, with nature, In these stories, we find men or women - sometimes at odds with themselves, sometimes transcendently well grounded - who have an experience that is profound, unsettling, and oddly liberating. In "Empira's Tapestry," a gravely ill woman begins to weave a luminous cloth in which is expressed all of the fervent desire she had for her life...In "Homecoming," a botanist has become so caught up with his academic ambitions that he forgets the names of the wildflowers in his own woods until his young daughter reteaches him...And in "The Entreaty of the Wiideema," an anthropologist traveling with an aboriginal people finds that, because of his aggressive desire to understand them, they remain for him always disturbingly unknowable.

c1980

"In this seminal work of poetry now widely recognized to have signaled a new era in Western Canadian writing, Robert Kroetsch departs on an expedition into history and story, literary form and myth, in search of the answer to the question of how to grow a poet on the limitless prairie, where, compared with European antecedents, all is absence. The question sends him on a literary archeological dig into an early seed catalogue and from there into a garden of memory and story, where the particulars of prairie experience shape a new geography of language and expression." "In this new edition of the work that brought the long poem to Western Canadian literature, renowned Alberta wood engraver Jim Westergard adds yet another level of interrogation with a series of visual responses to the questions posed by the poem."--BOOK JACKET.

""Prairie poetry," as it came to be known in the 20th century, has found no more eloquent and accomplished a practitioner than Robert Kroetsch. Yet the North American prairie his work has made so recognizably visible in all of its characteristic particularities is changing profoundly in the 21st century. This change is marked by the transition of a cultural identity primarily rooted in place, to one that is rooted in a rapidly fragmenting, urbanizing, technology-based globalization. In an opening dialogue between the archetypical practitioner of this poetics of place, Robert Kroetsch, and a new practitioner of a poetics of the search for the often sublimated sign, Jon Paul Fiorentino, the reader bears witness to a rare literary event - a master passing on his legacy to the students who have become his peers - the transition from the unifying classic articulation of place to the diaspora of the vernaculars it has engendered."--Jacket.

"It was part of our education, learning to lean on the wind, trusting the wind, learning to be the hypotenuse." "Trigonometry, our teacher explained, is the study of angles. Late for school is a failure to Connect two points with a straight line." "The blizzard sealed our eyes, we said. We had to walk backwards in order to see---our tracks in the snow, the shape of the wind." "The past, we argued, must be a curved line. Walking backwards in the driven snow, we had arrived, by our calculations, early to class." "With a prodigious body of innovative writing behind him, Robert Kroetsch turns to a Starker lyrical mode in Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait, Oscillating between the many moods of a human heart that has lived through so much---from whimsy and scorn through desire, longing, lust, love, and serenity---these sketches mark a candid walk through the tortuous corridors of the poet's remembering, and exemplify the memorable dictum of an old teacher. "Every enduring poem was written today."" ""This book is not an autobiography, It is a gesture toward a self-portrait, which I take to be quite a different kettle of fish."--Robert Kroetsch"--Jacket.