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. Throughout his career, he steadily elaborated his indelible mark on Canadian writing with his fiction, non-fiction, poetry, teaching, and scholarship.

Robert Kroetsch has spent his life writing about his favourite place - Alberta. On this week's Trailblazers, we sit down with the famed prairie author who received one of this year's Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Awards.

". . .the series succeeds in conveying the mixed blessing of an urban tropical vacation, [in a]-not-quite-serious tone. . . Snowbird speaks with a poet's romanticism. . . Poems from This Part of the Country mark Kroetsch as part of that school of prairie writers who gift us with their mindfulness of place." -- Sonnet L'Abbe, The Globe & Mail, 20 November 2004.

"The lovely thing about Kroetsch's 'lifetime achievement' is that it's nowhere near finished. His masterful new book of poetry, The Snowbird Poems, his 13th, resonates within and extends his earlier writing...There are new timbres in the wry, sad voice we have encountered elsewhere in Kroetsch's poetry, as well as mingling layers of mythic allusion." -- Chris Wiebe, VUE Weekly, Dec 16-22.

"The Snowbird Poems is an impressive anthology of the poetry of Canadian literary icon Robert Kroetsch." - Midwest Book Review, Reviewer's Bookwatch, June 2005

"These are dangling conversations, hints, and mere footprints in the sand of an endless shoreline. This is, in some sense, a collection of allusions." - Anne Burke, Prairie Journal Trust, July 14, 2005

"A glance through The Snowbird Poems shows that Kroetsch is still in fine form when it comes to the long poem: the 107-page book is essentially four individual poems broken (and melded) into their components, iterative and process-oriented, and lays strong claim to continuing his earlier work." - Matthew Holmes, Arc (Canada's National Poetry Magazine), Summer 2005

"It is a resonant moment when postmodern techniques are used to transcend, rather than revel in, the limits of language. This collection stands with the best of Kroetsch's impressive body of work." -- Adam Sol, Quill & Quire August 2004

"As the title suggests, these are holiday poems of a sort, or poems of refreshing, voluntary exile from oneself. We have every variety of prosaic spread and lyrical condensation, melancholic nostalgia and beach-ball whimsy." -- Jeffrey Davidson, The University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 75, Number 1, Winter 2006.