[The Sad Phoenician] is the latest sequence in a long poem by Robert Kroetsch, tentatively entitled "Field Notes." Earlier segments include "The Ledger" (1975), "Seed Catalogue" (1977), and "How I Joined the Seal Herd" (published in the Seed Catalogue volume). The present volume contains two poems: "The Sad Phoenician" and "The Silent Poet Sequence."

Unlike many contemporary long or serial poems—which seem to be bound together by no more coherent an organizing principle than the fact that they are the product of a single consciousness—"The Sad Phoenician" is identifiably part of a poetic sequence and takes on its fullest meaning when read as the fourth movement in a longer poem. (pp. 6-7)

"Field Notes" is an attempt to find a language for exploring "the imagined real place." Working within a succession of imposed imaginative structures (as the titles reflect, the ledger and the seed catalogue are the organizing devices of the first two poems), Kroetsch sounds out possible ways of imagining the real. Each poem at once struggles to create the dream and contends with the possibility that "no song can do that." "Seed Catalogue," for example, expresses the concern that the poet's "record" is an insignificant fabrication, worthless in the face of the real…. And yet without the creative act upon nature, there is "the danger of merely living." The landscape remains a wilderness. We learn nothing.

"The Sad Phoenician" takes this process of inquiry back to its rudiments. Here Kroetsch focuses on the act of language itself, building the poem as a kind of test chamber within which he systematically probes the capabilities and limits of poetic speech. The organizing device in this case is the alphabet, with each of 26 passages set in counterpoint to a letter. The structural conditions of the test are made more rigorous still by pegging the syntax, from beginning to end, to alternating constructions of "and" and "but." Within this formal framework, Kroetsch locates an embattled protagonist, "The Sad Phoenician of Love." He is the poet (the Phoenicians, we are reminded, were the inventors and dispensers of the alphabet) and the failed lover….

As a trader in language he has charted the world but has lost contact with his home, himself as lover, the "actuality" of his own life. He is "at sea" in the sense that he is both engaged in the search for the real and lost within it. Through 26 shufflings of contending images of the poet (as explorer/evader; seer/trickster; namer/manipulator; and, in the culminating image on which the dialectics of the poem hinge, "Phoenician"/"Phoney") Kroetsch explores the power of language [to reveal and conceal.]… (p. 7)

"The Sad Phoenician" offers the confirming evidence, which "The Ledger" and "Seed Catalogue" had led us to anticipate, of Kroetsch's emergence as a master of the long poem…. "The Sad Phoenician," for the dizzying involutions of its word play, is an intricately patterned poem with each image, each verbal detail, taken up in an elaborate system of echoes and anticipations. It is not the kind of poetic writing that we see a great deal of in Canada today, its formal affinities being more with a certain stream of recent British poetry … than with anything characteristically North American.

"The Silent Poet Sequence," presumably the fifth of the "Field Notes" series, is clearly an independent poem, but displays certain formal and thematic links to "The Sad Phoenician," being designed, it would seem, as a coda of sorts to that work. Although it dispenses with the alphabet as a structuring device, it retains the syntactic shifting between "and" and "but." As well, it picks up in its first line on the final image of the earlier poem. The transmutation of the protagonist from "The Sad Phoenician" into "The Silent Poet" (he retains the same initials) is emblematic of the process of diminishment that the "Sequence" documents. As in "How I Joined the Seal Herd," in which the hero is reduced to silence by the truths he has explored in the foregoing poem ("Seed Catalogue"), so here, acquiescing to the image of himself as "Phoney" that the main poem has proposed, the protagonist slips into silence, courting the anarchy he now has no hope of ordering.

The "Sequence" is a curious appendage of the title poem. Taken on its own, it is an interesting and skilful piece of writing, and read in the context of "Field Notes" as a whole it can be seen to have a place as a separate fifth movement. Viewed specifically as an extension of "The Sad Phoenician," however, it sits somewhat uneasily, as if it were an afterthought to bind the two more closely together. Granted, the poems are integrally related to the extent that the image presented in "The Silent Poet Sequence" is conditional on what has been represented immediately previously—but the same may be said of the relation of any section of "Field Notes" to the poem preceding it. Why Kroetsch has chosen to suggest a closer continuity between these two particular movements is not readily evident. Essentially the two sequences read as independent elements within the continuum of the longer poem, and the suggestion that in some ways they are part of the same unit only confuses things. (pp. 7-8)