Advice to My Friends: A Continuing Poem

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

Robert Kroetsch’s sixth collection contains eight sections loosely connected to each other by theme — namely, sly introspection, nostalgia, inward and outward voyaging, and full circle to return to the womb of the poet’s mother, who has died (probably recently). Other tangential themes emerge along the way, some of them seemingly trivial (such as the hockey / game of life metaphor in the first two sections); but the theme of time passing and age dominates throughout and winds its way seminally through the entire book. The “advice” mentioned in the book’s title is clearly meant for the poet himself, and it is actually more musing than advice. This is a problem for this collection because, although there is a strong narrative line, and some very clever line breaks and structural devices are deployed, it is very difficult to determine just what the poet is getting at. Overall there is a faintly elegiac tone, but this is juxtaposed with silly in jokes which, for the general reader, disappear out of sight and mind and are simply confusing. Mr. Kroetsch could be addressing either a personal crisis on the peace that comes when the crisis is solved: it’s impossible to tell. The travel poems in the section “Postcards from China” are the most homogeneous and most enjoyable. There is no scarcity of acute images here and there is certainly much evidence of an active and creative intelligence, but it does not coalesce properly; a good editor could have and should have whipped this collection into shape.