Robert Kroetsch. The Hornbooks of Rita K.

Henry, Richard

Edmonton. University of Alberta Press 2001. 107 pages. Can$16.95 ISBN 0-88864-372-1

ROBERT KROETSCH'S LATEST collection of verse adds to an impressive body of fiction and poetry, a body that includes the 1969 novel The Studhorse Man, which won Canada's Governor General's Award. "Born into a gap in [the] narrative world," Kroetsch has spent a lifetime filling that gap. The Hornbooks of Rita K might just obliterate the gap for good.

The occasion is the disappearance of Rita Kleinhart, a reclusive poet who lives in the Canadian prairie. Her friend and sometime lover, Raymond, discovers her absence and assumes a curatorial role as he sits at her kitchen table and sifts through page after page of her poetry. Raymond's meditations on their relationship and on her poetry constitute the bulk of the narrative; excerpts from her poems provide the motivation for his commentary. Her poems are numbered, 1-99. More than a dozen are "missing"; a handful are repeated. Rather than present them in numerical order, however, Raymond rearranges and collates them into five "mounds" to suit his own "reading." In addition to these numbered hornbooks are others lettered A-K. A few more have titles. Two of them break through to the author's world with their explicit references to fellow poets George Bowering and Doug Barbour.

The Hornbooks of Rita K marks a radical departure from Kroetsch's Collected Field Notes, reissued last year by the University of Alberta Press, even as his sensibility remains postmodern and multivocal. In Collected Field Notes Kroetsch's journey is intensely personal, as he engages the lives of his grandfather, his lovers, and his daughters. Hornbooks is much less so, even to the point of trying to efface the "I" in the poems (wherein "I" refers to Kroetsch). The voices in Field Notes, however, are in constant conversation with each other, just as Rita's hornbooks and Raymond's meditations are in constant conversation. In both volumes the conversations are often "defective." The absence of Rita K appears to give Raymond the last word even as the traces of her remains are important determinants that shape Raymond's observations and, indeed, his life.

Kroetsch's narratives are never traditional. In The Hornbooks of Rita K his story develops by accretion, or the slow process of sedimentation, as Raymond shuffles Rita's poems and his commentary into piles. This shuffling allows Kroetsch's playfulness to shine and offers its own occasion for wry commentary. In "[hornbook#[]]" (sic), for example, Raymond opines: "One of the considerable and neglected art forms is the stack of papers," whereupon he launches into a minimanifesto on performance art and "the stack." And so we find Raymond the wit, ever aware of his own presence in the shaping and presentation of Rita's work.

If Collected Field Notes marked a slow lapse into the poet's silence, The Hornbooks of Rita K marks a welcome return of one of Canada's foremost poets.

Richard Henry
SUNY, Potsdam