[In the following review, Bowery praises Kroetsch's literary criticism in The Lovely Treachery of Words.]

In Canada we often write “poet-novelist” before a writer’s name. We have to do this more than most countries do. Of course most of these poet-novelists toss off an essay from time to time. But we seldom feel that it would be sensible to write “poet-novelist-critic.”

Margaret Atwood writes reviews and makes the odd address to a group of elected representatives. A long time ago Michael Ondaatje wrote a little chapbook on Leonard Cohen; bp Nichol wrote in all three forms, but you had to take his word about which was which.

Robert Kroetsch was successful first as a novelist. Then he became the first novelist to influence the poets as a poet. Next to Atwood he is the most often interviewed writer in the country. All along he has been not only writing the literary essay, but also reinventing it. He has not just written the requisite papers of a writer who works at universities; he has produced famous essays. They have introduced famous phrases into the literature.

Some of those famous essays, such as “Unhiding the Hidden” and “An Erotics of Space,” reappear in this collection.

When I go to conferences on Canadian literature in New Zealand and Australia and Italy and Germany, it is Kroetsch I hear those foreigners writing about. Maybe this is because he practises literary theory. In so doing he breaks an old Anglo-Canadian proscription against thinking about what you are doing in the making of literature.

There are 17 essays in this collection. Some of them appeared in an earlier collection of Kroetsch’s essays, edited by bp Nichol and Frank Davey, and published as an issue of their journal, Open Letter in 1983. (It has been for five years a much-annotated college textbook.) The rest are treatments of narrative in Canadian fiction. In fact only one of the essays is in total about verse, the much-presented “For Play and Entrance; the Contemporary Canadian Long Poem.”

Kroetsch performs what seems to be a paradox (and he will not be unhappy to see that word). He casts his eye and nets wide over Canadian narrative, from Haliburton to Buckler, Ross, Laurence, and Audrey Thomas. He is all-embracing, too widely encouraging, according to some of his readers. He finds valuable stuff practically anywhere in our letters. Yet he is the most readable critic, and I think that is so because he treats his criticism as part of a multilogue with our other writers. In a book-length interview he once said, “I think criticism is really a version of story … the story of our search for story.”

That word “our” appears often in Kroetsch’s writing. His subject is sometimes the ways in which we can make ourselves Canadians. That is likely part of the reason that so many of these essays were begun as papers at international conferences. But Kroetsch connects finding ourselves with finding a way to speak. He takes chances, foolish ones sometimes, and that promotes our faith. He takes plunges, sees something delicious in the new European theory deli and gobbles it down without sitting at their table.

Narrative strategies are his preoccupation. Northrop Frye, he says here, is our epic poet. Christopher Columbus is the mythic hero. Christopher Columbus was an Orpheus. America was not his Hades but his Eurydice.

Kroetsch finds Orpheus all over Canadian literature, in which the wounded artist is so often the central figure, in which we find so many idyllic and doomed couples, in which our citizens are under the ground, at the bottom of a lake, buried by snow or earth or trees. Here we see the way that Orpheus haunts Malcolm Lowry’s fiction. Howárd O’Hagan’s Tay John is “an inverse Orpheus figure. He has come up from under the ground, not with speech or poetry, but with silence.”

What I like about things such as Kroetsch’s discovery of Orpheus among us supposedly placid Canadians is the excitement in the finding. Kroetsch does not present the waxed and polished fruits of his research. We see always the autobiographical, the search. We get a man standing by his words, not behind them. He is writing his reading. Thus we are invited to do and offer our own.

A bonus in this volume is an irregular piece called “Towards an Essay: My Upstate New York Journals.” This resembles The Crow Journals, and dates from 1970 to 1974. The last entry we get is another of Kroetsch’s demonstrations against closure: “I said to Jane, what is the subject of a love poem? She said, There can only be one subject of a love poem. What? I asked her.” Orpheus, we reflect, went to Hell to try to erase closure.

“To reveal all is to end the story,” Kroetsch says to begin one essay. So he tells us what he prizes among the deferred, the hidden, the secret, including silence as a narrative strategy. He loves those secretive writers: Grove, Lowry, O’Hagan, Sheila Watson. His famous “unnaming” and “uncreating” are actions taken against enclosing history. They are meant to return us to origins, where myth can precede factism, to “avoid both meaning and conclusiveness,” he once said.

So one might anticipate, while enjoying these essays, that there is more to come, more beginnings. Even though these essays are pressed between boards made by the Oxford University Press, Orpheus’s head will continue to sing along its river path to the never reachable sea.