Too Bad

A prodigious body of innovative writing behind him, Robert Kroetsch turns to a starker lyrical mode in Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait. Oscillating between the many moods of a human heart that has lived through so much-from whimsy and scorn through desire, longing, lust, love, and serenity-these sketches mark a candid walk through the tortuous corridors of the poet's remembering, and exemplify the rehearsed dictum of an old teacher: "Every enduring poem was written today." Simply put, "This book is not an autobiography. It is a gesture toward a self-portrait, which I take to be quite a different kettle of fish." -- Robert Kroetsch, from the Introduction Governor General's Award-winning author shows through stark lyric how "every enduring poem was written today." With a prodigious body of innovative writing behind him, Robert Kroetsch turns to a starker lyrical mode in Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait. Oscillating between the many moods of a human heart that has lived through so much--from whimsy and scorn through desire, longing, lust, love, and serenity--these sketches mark a candid walk through the tortuous corridors of the poet's remembering, and exemplify the memorable dictum of an old teacher: "Every enduring poem was written today." "This book is not an autobiography. It is a gesture toward a self-portrait, which I take to be quite a different kettle of fish." --Robert Kroetsch Walking Backwards in a Blizzard It was part of our education, learning to lean on the wind, trusting the wind, learning to be the hypotenuse. Trigonometry, our teacher explained, is the study of angles. Late for school is a failure to connect two points with a straight line. The blizzard sealed our eyes, we said. We had to walk backwards in order to see-- our tracks in the snow, the shape of the wind. The past, we argued, must be a curved line. Walking backwards in the driven snow, we had arrived, by our calculations, early to class. About the Author Born in Heisler, Alberta, Robert Kroetsch published his first novel, But We are Exiles in 1965, and his book The Studhorse Man (1969) won the Governor General's Award for Fiction. He has steadily elaborated his indelible mark on Canadian writing ever since with his fiction, non-fiction, poetry, teaching, and scholarship. He lives in Leduc, Alberta. "Recognizing that memory is fiction, Kroetsch tells a lot of tales, from childhood through adulthood...but the portrait that evolves is multiple, protean, impossible to pin down. The poems range from comic-philosophic meditations on writing through slightly satiric comments on our all-too-human behaviour to lovely, deliberately and intelligently nostalgic memories.... [Kroetsch] keeps writing new fictions of self, and offers his readers in Too Bad one more brilliant addition to his oeuvre." Douglas Barbour, Edmonton Journal, February 28, 2010 "Too Bad straddles the line between memoir and self-creation, replete with Kroetsch's trademark playfulness and ambiguity. In his long and successful literary career, [Kroetsch] has always resisted assignment to tidy category or transparent meaning.... Too Bad is true to form in its provocation and elusiveness.... Too Bad asks the reader to join in the act of self-creation. 'We connect the dots. That's kind of what I'm asking the reader to do. And they might connect in different ways.'" Geoff McMaster, ExpressNews, February 22, 2010 [Full article at: http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/print.cfm?id=10827] "...poet, novelist, critical theorist, ex-professorial old-age pensioner, mischievous trickster and certifiable genius Robert Kroetsch, perhaps one of a half-dozen - oh, okay, maybe eight, tops - distinguished word-workers permanently ensconced in the penthouse of lyrical perfectitude, especially when it comes to versifyin', particularly when it comes to his freshest collection, the bloody brilliant Too Bad. Too much. Simply way too much too good too great." Judith Fitzgerald, The Globe and Mail, May 7