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...