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. Remarkably versatile in both form and content, these extended meditations bear witness to Kroetsch's modernist inheritance and his well-known postmodern jouissance. Whether it be the evocation of an Australian beach or the account of the stone hammer found in a prairie field, we find again and again delight and elusiveness in Kroetsch's poetic journeys. 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, offering a voyage of the mind and spirit, inside and outside language. | Completed Field Notes by Robert Kroetsch, Paperback | Indigo Chapters