Field Notes is Kroetsch's "collected poems." It contains nine long poems, arranged as "field notes 1-8" and a prologue, "Stone Hammer Poem," from Kroetsch's first book…. The selection engagingly displays Kroetsch's wide range as a poet, his supplely shifting tones, his seriousness, humour, and irony, his talent for epigram, lyricism, description, and narrative, his formal inventiveness, his learning, and his deft, unassuming way with an allusion. His decision to present his poetry as an accumulating single work is justified, as was Yeats's, by the continuity of its themes, and by the gathering, self-reflexive awareness that intensifies these themes in and through all variations of style and form.

Throughout his book Kroetsch confronts the mute innocence of earth and the baffling presence of this (natural and/or divine?) enigma joined with a human person in woman. The microcosmic theme of love and the difficulties of embodying it in a sexual relationship are linked with the terrible social problem of worthily husbanding the land.

A second, closely related, nexus of concerns more or less completes the survey of Kroetsch's intellectual "field." To teach himself how to husband, he looks for the help of a history, a tradition, a memory, a muse. This search occurs primarily in the first two major poems, "The Ledger" and "Seed Catalogue." It leads to what can only be described as an agony of not-finding, although the pain is partially concealed or denied in the later poems through strategies of self-deprecation, irony, and ambiguity that become ever more prominent as the work advances.

In his prologue, Kroetsch begins with an attempt to remove himself as poet from the guilty self-absorption he seems to see in all previous cultures, and to achieve personal innocence…. Kroetsch identifies the poem with the [stone-age] hammer: a thing shaped by man, but in its basic identity a mute object of nature, surviving the generations of men and their pride.

But it is this very presumption of innocence, this idealization of the poem, that is progressively criticized and—at least for the time being—rejected as Field Notes unfolds. In "The Ledger" and "Seed Catalogue," the poet is gradually implicated in his society: he is its product, though not necessarily its most useful or praiseworthy product. At the same time his society (settlement Alberta) is seen to be impoverished, despite its valuable qualities, and to be guilty with regard to its handling of the land. It suffers from a grievous loss of memory of possibilities and duties.

Kroetsch sums up the forgetfulness of his culture in a list of "absences" that includes everything from silkworms and sailing ships to Aeneas, the pious culture-bringer and preserver of ancient gods. In "The Ledger" the poem still seems "a scaffolding / in the chaos." By the end of "Seed Catalogue," which is in fact a catalogue of the "seed" dilemmas that give rise to the later poetry, Kroetsch sees only the barren newness of the prairie landscape, untouched by the depredations of a slap/dash culture that has accomplished nothing except to kill the innocent Adam and Eve within the would-be poet, and he is at a loss to know how to create himself out of the shambles.

Afterward the book does not recover or develop from this crux; rather, it explores the emptiness, the overwhelming difficulty Kroetsch has found. "How I Joined the Seal Herd," for instance, is a serio-comic dissection of primitivistic longing, the desperate self-contradictory desire to achieve, to marry, animal innocence. The mock-Stevensian "Sketches of a Lemon" dithers purposefully to satirize the major pretension of modern lyricism: the achievement of a temporal salvation through sensual intensity and poetic form, that is, a "way of seeing."

Kroetsch's finest achievement, "The Sad Phoenician," is a larger meditation on the same basic dilemma: the mistrust of (and dissociation from) all older traditions, the sense of the failure of his own traditions—modern Alberta and modern literary intellectualism. The effort to remake the world from scratch ends in equivocality and confusion, pride and emptiness…. (pp. 21-2)

This remarkable poem encapsulates many of the issues of modern poetry. [Kroetsch expresses] the longing for pure experience, for escape from memory's burden…. The aspiration is mocked, but the parodic echo of the poet's proud "I sing" keeps contact with the longed-for but disbelieved ideal of a truly human culture. The Sad Phoenician directs his endless voyage to the contradictory goals of atavistic innocence and the City of Man.

The central element of Kroetsch's perception is the "Or vice versa."… Kroetsch gives us a whole intellectual history: the surrender of mind and spirit to the overwhelming presence of the physical, the ensuing psychoanalytical suspicion that the spiritual is merely a repressive idealization of the physical, the inability to decide, the decision to establish a new "way" of physical and emotional intensity. The "Or vice versa" stands for the inability to decide, the irony of the honest modern poet when he confronts relativism, which pretends to have demolished past faiths when in fact relativism itself is as "relative" as any dogma.

In a sense, then, "Or vice versa" opens the door to hope, to conversion by a tradition that can save. But at the same time it is a trap, a vast empty space, the desert of doubt and suspicion of everything. Formally, stylistically, Kroetsch's poetry moves toward ambiguity, and simultaneously toward a bitter satirization of the self and the society that can do nothing more than dwell in its confusions….

The question this poetry ultimately raises is that of the poet who has registered the emptiness of his time, but who nonetheless seems to lack the will, the basic seriousness, to reject radically what he has radically criticized. Through analysis and autobiography and laughter Kroetsch has demolished today's ironically reduced Prometheanism, but thus far he seems merely paralyzed by the sense that there is nothing better. The degree of struggle that his poetry ventures, both in form and content, with other traditions in their full strength, however, is negligible. He has yet to show the willingness to stand before anything that can say to him, "You must change your life."

But Kroetsch is seeking; he cannot be content with the purely aesthetic resolution, which is all the "modern tradition" offers. He clings to the possibility of the earth, the wholeness of man, and he longs to be in his speech what he is in his silence…. (p. 22)