Over the past decade Kroetsch has rather quickly established himself as a novelist of significance, but it is as a poet that he has chosen to explore the ancestry of his own imagination.

In such novels as Badlands, Gone Indian, and The Studhorse Man Kroetsch has rummaged in the boneyards of western history and culture in search of the myths that make us real. In The Ledger the quest is more personal…. But the poem is not a simple record of search. What we get here is the poet watching himself search, watching himself write, and finding some pleasure in the irony of his self-regarding posture….

Like all good seekers the poet collects the artifacts and documents of the past. The book contains maps, pages from a ledger, newspaper reports, dictionary definitions, even a letter from the poet's aunt. It is the ledger, however, the daily record of the transactions of his grandfather's sawmill, that gives the poem its shape and its basic metaphor. Indeed everything about the volume, from the green embossed cover to the columns of poetry, speaks of the urge to register, to list, to find a balance in the commerce of life. Within this form, the poet as book-keeper, as a clerk of the imagination, records the various possibilities of the ledger metaphor. Working with a definition of ledger as timber for example, Kroetsch articulates the agrarian and mercantile vision of the pioneer…. A ledger may be a "horizontal piece of timber," but it is also, as Kroetsch takes delight in noting, "a book that lies permanently in place." Here in a pun is the link that the poet has been seeking, the link between Kroetsch and his grandfather, between the poet and the bookkeeper…. The poem lies, the ledger lies, each in the service of a kind of truth. Both the poem and the ledger are balancing acts.

The highest balance in The Ledger is the Jungian awareness that the darkness, the shadow, must be reckoned with. This injunction shines through in a wonderful section in praise of his grandmother. Kroetsch exploits the two-column form of his poem ledger to articulate the balance…. From the reader's angle, the great balancing act may simply be the one that allows Kroetsch so deftly and with such grace to balance the credit of his poetic vision with the debit of a sawyer's ledger.