Abstract

The paper focuses on the way Robert Kroetsch recreates his home place Alberta and Canada in his essays and poetry, especially in his poem Seed Catalogue. He stresses the need to unname the place, to free it of the inherited layers of meanings, and rewrite it again by generating and inscribing new Canadian meanings to it. Through the speaker's "memory of colonialism", the poem presents the history of European colonization of the prairies as problematizing its status as "home ground". Kroetsch's idea of "the dream of origins" and his desire to locate an origin in a place and construct a home through language derive from a profound sense of dislocation