Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue carries with it something of the aura of Tobe's Catalogue and perhaps for this reason it is a difficult work to review. This elusiveness seems to be a quality intrinsic to the genre to which Seed Catalogue belongs, the long auto-biographical poem.

In one sense the long autobiographical poem is of no interest whatsoever to the reader. What a man or a woman eats for breakfast, when he or she first copulates, falls in love, leaves home, can be, for strangers, matters of some indifference….

What can save the long autobiographical poem seems to me to be a voice which engages the reader in a dialogue which transcends the poet's life, and a patterning which also points beyond the individual life. Few autobiographical poems have either of these virtues, the virtues of Whitman, Olson, Williams and Ginsberg's Howl in American poetry.

Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue does have this strong narrative voice, at times humorous, probing, specific, tragic….

[It is at once tender] and mythologizing…. (p. 46)

It is a voice which changes often, takes on many characters….

[Seed Catalogue is a poem of what Kroetsch calls the] "imagined real place," and its patterning which transcends the individual life in the best way is embodied as this dream of, really a search for, origins, the quintessential Canadian voyage.

Seed Catalogue is not just a single poem. The volume consists of three sections. The first, "Seed Catalogue," and the last, "How I joined the Seal Herd," are parts 2 and 3 of a continuing poem Field Notes, of which part 1 "The Ledger" has already been published…. The middle section of Seed Catalogue consists of a group of poems which in their immediacy and control stand well on their own…. Despite the fact that 2 parts of the present volume belong to a future volume, they do cohere admirably and Seed Catalogue as it stands is an engrossing and moving work….

It is too soon to say that Robert Kroetsch's continuing poem Field Notes will be for Canadian poetry what Whitman and company are for American poetry. Too soon to say whether what finally emerges will be flowers or dragons. But whatever grows, the present volume … is a remarkable achievement. (p. 47)