[In the following review, Caile praises the second edition of Alberta.]

The Canadian province of Alberta corresponds to states to the south wherein plains and mountains meet. In Alberta, Robert Kroetsch describes the contrasting elements of splendid peaks and vast rolling plains, of wide rivers and parched homesteads, of coal mines, wheat and oil fields, of an Indian past and robust upstart cities.

Alberta’s settlers have maintained their distinctive cultural groupings to a greater extent than in the United States, however. Its northern placement introduces muskeg and glaciers to the equation. Its people—in many ways the focus of the book—seem a thinner layer atop a larger land.

Robert Kroetsch gives us a writer’s travel guide—a profile of a province, a portrait of the people who live on it. Names roll out from his account with their own poetry. He utters them with obvious relish, appreciating their intrinsic rhythms and imagery.

NeWest’s Alberta is a second edition, coming 25 years after the original publication. It opens with a foreword, a 1990s writing-class road trip, and closes with remarks by novelist Rudy Wiebe. The several parts of the book fit together, yet easily break apart into separate sections.

The middle of the book, Kroetsch’s original Alberta, is itself a pastiche of seasons and road trips, interviews and vignettes, camping and horse-pack adventures, shot through with history—like veins of cinnamon. The virtue of the book lies with Kroetsch’s dry wit, his fascination with individual Albertans, and his poetic prose:

In the south, the Oldman and the Bow flow together to become the South Saskatchewan, and all of them sprout tall cottonwoods in the shortgrass country of Blackfoot memories and cattle and wheat.

One of the most pleasing stories is of a trip he, his wife, and another couple made from Banff to Jasper, with time to marvel at the Athabasca glacier. The trip is quintessential car camping, before the sport had been attacked by a merchandising fervor.

Kroetsch does not theorize much, except perhaps on the attraction of Bible-belt religion to the people of the province where he was born. We are left to form our own opinions, trusting his telling of the story. He never overreaches his experience as the descendant of European immigrants, though he shares respect and sorrow with the tribes of the province. Wiebe’s afterword expresses a contemporary rage at the way the tribal past of the province has been discarded by other writers.

Reflecting on the simple entertainments of rural Alberta, Kroetsch remembers his time on the baseball diamond:

Maybe that did it, I thought—maybe that was one of the things that turned me into a writer—my playing far out in the field. The playing, and the watching that went with it. The listening, out there. The wanting to enter the game while fearing that someone might hit the ball in my direction. The being isolated, out there in the prairie wind and the summer light; my striking up a conversation with a nearby gopher as I watched the pitched ball. … The caring so much, so enduringly, for the movements of small creatures, for the ongoing game, for all the shouting and the laughter that are some of the various names of love.

From left field, Kroetsch gives us Alberta. His perspective is enhanced by the photographs of Harry Savage—small reproductions, nicely composed, framing the colorful features of the land.