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...