With Field Notes, Robert Kroetsch brings together nine parts of the long and continuing poem of that name. "Stone Hammer Poem," the introductory section, appeared as the title-piece of a collection in 1975 (Kroetsch's first book of poetry)…. Field Notes is also described on the title-page as "The Collected Poetry of Robert Kroetsch"—though it contains none of the short poems he has published during the same six years.

A preface by Eli Mandel offers a sprightly and acute introduction to the poet Kroetsch or Poet/kroetsch, disclosing this figure with gleeful flourish. It is, as a piece of critical writing, like the Prologue to Pagliacci, part of the act. (p. 36)

[Kroetsch's own address, "For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem," is written] in an aphoristic, non-linear fashion, reminiscent of Susan Sontag, and making wide reference to recently-published long poems in Canada, it will rightly become a source text for anyone interested in its subject. But here, it has an anti-climactic, even slightly bathetic impact. After the playful wisdom of Mandel's opening and the often shimmering wit of Field Notes, it reads like special-pleading, even timidity about the authority of the poetry itself.

The poetry is quite another matter. (pp. 36-7)

Field Notes is a continuing, incomplete, uncompletable poem …, a long, nimble telling of the stories words tell, to which people comply. Full of puns, panic and a kind of impish nervous cackle as his own sexual absurdities afflict him, the Kroetsch persona inflates and self-deflates with compulsive, triumphant eloquence.

He lives, as Mandel declares, in a binary world, where everything is capable of parody, where we are all twicers half the time, never breaking even when we try to double-up. In "The Sad Phoenician" and "The Silent Poet Sequence," Kroetsch echoes Kierkegaard's Either/Or by introducing his lines with alternating And or But. So he goes on: this way or that, up/down, in/out, he-she.

The epigraph to Field Notes defines its onrushing, unstill quality…. What we are never allowed to know—the questions being unanswerable—is the where to or where from. Kroetsch has always been fascinated by the conflicting or perhaps adjacent claims of flight, quest, enlargement, fiction—the world-self is an empire of possibility, of open forms—and origins, "ground," place, descent, mining the dark places for the motherlode. He begins, in "The Stone Hammer Poem," with "stone/bone," the words of our enduring. "The Ledger" searches for historical Kroetsches: those of his people who, being named, feed and amplify his own persona in the uttering. Here (as elsewhere) he adopts a double-column, double-entry structure, as a parody of the family document which gives the poem its title. Left to right, right to left, the eye seeks the true poem. It never finds a balance, never closes the account.

Primordial bone, ledger of past debts and payments—after these, "Seed Catalogue" asks "How Do You Grow a Poet?" Reflecting upon the influence of his mother and father, and their homestead in Heisler, Alberta, upon his own development, Kroetsch asks—for in "Seed Catalogue" the persona is less projected than recollected—questions about the male/female principles, the aesthetics of prairie space, the dual claims of love and beautiful lies. And in "Seed Catalogue" too the intricate and fictive narrative persona of the later sections of "Field Notes" approaches birth—though the predominant note here is sombre, even elegaic.

It is with "How I Joined the Seal Herd" that the true, antic voice begins to speak. Kroetsch's self-parody … is a crude definition of this stance: "The Artist as Clown and Pornographer"—for the efforts of Kroetsch as bull-seal to mate with his cow upon the icy shore mark the abandonment of any crypto-historical self. Having flippered his id, the persona enters a game of sexual dance and stratagem: new rolls for the old Adam. In this phase, still proceeding, this Kroetsch—his very name a forked-fate—goes after sexual puns like a June bee at the pollen….

Yet language, like the act we get caught in, must be renewed, rediscovered. Kroetsch keeps struggling out of cliche, a lover trapped in the winding-sheet…. (p. 37)

The wanderer, Phoenician, like Hazard Lepage in The Studhorse Man, en route/rooted from sea to sea, from the mare he seeks to serve to the mare of oblivion, death. What's in between? Words, the horn of maleness, stories about freedom. "The Sad Phoenician" is a long comic lament for various women skilled in the transformational grammar of their roles. They do before they are done to; always, as it were, a jump ahead of the speaker. He tries his best. He gives tongue.

There is, of course, the option of silence. Perhaps Kroetsch will announce, towards the end of his days, like Ezra Pound, "I quit talking." But for the time being he accepts the Orphic paradox: word-men only opt-out into more language….

The final three sections of "Field Notes" reveal (betray?) another talking-self, quieter, less confident perhaps. The theme is the possibility of love in a human zoo….

I'm not sure of where Field Notes is going. But it's some ride, all the same. (p. 38)