Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait

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.

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