Robert Kroetsch - Böcker

A collection of essays by distinguished novelist, poet and critic Robert Kroetsch. In this collection Kroetsch dwells on the silence, the violence, and the erotics of writers as different as Sinclair Ross and Malcolm Lowry, Margaret Lawrence and Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro and Willa Cather. The essays are extremely varied, and are characterized by an informal voice. This volume will be of interest to students of literature as well as the general reader.

The Hornbooks of Rita K, Robert Kroetsch's first volume of new poetry in more than a decade, is a brilliant collection of mysterious fragments. Where has Rita gone and who is reconstructing her oeuvre? Written with wit and playfulness, Hornbooks is a welcome new work from one of Canada's best writers.

Hazard Lepage, the last of the studhorse men, sets out to breed his rare blue stallion, Poseidon. A lusty trickster and a wayward knight, Hazard's outrageous adventures are narrated by Demeter Proudfoot, his secret rival, who writes this story while sitting naked in an empty bathtub. In his quest to save his stallion’s bloodline from extinction, Hazard leaves a trail of anarchy and confusion. Everything he touches erupts into chaos, necessitating frequent convalescences in the arms of a few good women, except for those of Martha, his long-suffering intended. Told with the ribald zeal of a Prairie beer parlor tall tale and the mythic magnitude of a Greek odyssey, The Studhorse Man is Robert Kroetsch’s celebration of unbridled character set against the backdrop of rough-and-ready Alberta emerging after the Second World War. Introduction by Aritha van Herk.

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 rehearsed dictum of an old teacher: "Every enduring poem was written today." Simply put, "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, from the Introduction

Post-glacial is a collection of poems by Robert Kroetsch selected by his former student David Eso. The book features Kroetsch's iconic collection, Completed Field Notes, alongside rare work gathered from different stages of Kroetsch's career. The book contains an afterword by Aritha van Herk.Kroetsch's poetry evolved from short lyric poetry in the 1960s to postmodern long poems in the 1970s and 80s. Kroetsch's work in the 1990s and 2000s was marked by the production of experimental chapbooks. Yet it is in the 2000s that Kroetsch's celebrated The Hornbooks of Rita K and his final collection, Too Bad, were published. Post-glacial presents the material in a thematic arc that follows daily, seasonal, and biographical topics. The collection moves from moods of morning, spring, and youth to shades of darkness, winter, and mourning.In the introduction, Eso charts Kroetsch's early attempts at poetry in his teenage and undergraduate years. Eso takes the title Post-glacial from the poem ""Lonesome Writer Diptych"" and proposes the term as an alternative to ""postmodernism,"" a term often used by critics to describe Kroetsch's work. Post-glacial emphasizes the poet's interest in landscape, ecology, history, the presence of absence, and the endurance of a living past.