The Snowbird Poems

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Robert Kroetsch has created an interesting and thoroughly Canadian mask
for himself: a snowbird is a denizen of the cold north wintering in a
warm American clime—in this case, Florida. Snowbird’s
self-deprecating and self-deconstructing observations are vintage
Kroetsch. In the first section, his wry persona lies (the verb is
carefully chosen) “beached” with a muse named Henrietta, reading
books and checking out the bikinis, two vintage Kroetschian occupations.
Robinson Crusoe’s discovery of a footprint on the beach is a recurring
theme. Another section explores the South Seas through reading, mostly
about the journeys of Captain Cook and Herman Melville.

Not all the poems are set in Florida. Snowbird, like Kroetsch, spends
time as a writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary. The poems
about that sojourn are perhaps too academic, too self-conscious about
the minutiae of literary life, but the ones about the Calgary artist
John Snow are moving. The long “Poem for My Dead Sister” manages to
be deeply elegiac and deeply committed to wordplay and rhyme.

The last sequence in the book, “This Part of the Country,” is pure
Kroetsch in its interrogation of how we construct as well as perceive
the ultimately unknowable landscape, in this case the Rockies.
“Landscape is a diagram of the impossible,” he says, a message he
has been conveying in paradox and fable for much of his career.

This book is not quite up to the level of his indispensable early
collections, but it is as refreshing as a holiday in Florida or the
South Seas.