Contemporary Literary Criticism | Kroetsch, Robert (Vol. 132) - Wanda Campbell (essay date 1996)

Wanda Campbell (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: “Strange Plantings: Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue,” in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 21, No. 1, 1996, pp. 17-36.

[In the following essay, Campbell argues that Seed Catalogue depends on an organic structure that evokes meaning from its content.]

My poem Seed Catalogue is about a prairie garden. I actually used the McKenzie Seed Catalogue from McKenzie Seeds in Brandon. This was part of my effort to locate the poem in a particular place and then I expanded the poem outward to whatever other models I wanted—the garden of Eden or whatever—so that I could get all those garden echoes working together. We have an experience of particular garden here. There are certain kinds of things we can grow and certain things we can’t grow. The garden gives us shape.

(Robert Kroetsch qtd. in MacKinnon 15)

It is my...

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