Seed Catalogue: A Poem

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue has achieved a well-deserved eminence
as a core text of what might be called the prairie postmodern. Since its
first publication in 1977, it has been hailed as both a generative text
for other writers and one of the most entertaining poems in the Canadian
canon. In its serious comedy, its parodic relationship to traditional
poetic texts, its insistence that a poet can be grown, even on a prairie
farm, and despite all the literary and historic absences found there, it
offers a slyly demotic yet highly sophisticated reading experience, and
one that continues to provoke new writing.

Although it can be found in anthologies and in Kroetsch’s Completed
Field Notes, it deserves to be available in a new edition. After the
brilliantly illustrated first edition (in which the poem was placed
against a background of pages from an ancient seed catalogue), the poem
has appeared in plain-text versions. This new edition contains wood
engravings by Jim Westergard, and they clearly reveal a master of the
craft. His small illustrations of actual vegetables and grains, in the
body of the text, are beautifully evocative and fit perfectly into the
ongoing poem. His full-page illustrations, however, fail for me
precisely because they are realistically descriptive of what the poem
suggests in a line or two. By being too specific, they take away from
the metaphoric and imagistic suggestiveness of the poem.

Seed Catalogue is a lovely book, and many readers will find the
illustrations charming. Moreover, one can only praise a new edition of
this major work. Robert Kroetsch is one of our finest makers, and this
is his most famous poem.