When North is South: the production of vertical and horizontal space in Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue and Birk Sproxton’s Phantom Lake

Abstract

Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue, an autobiographical long poem about growing up in Heisler, Alberta, and Birk Sproxton’s Phantom Lake, a narrative approach to growing up in Flin Flon, Manitoba, appear to have little in common, but when read as textualized geography are strikingly similar. Concerned with the nature of place/space, Seed Catalogue maps and reinvents the Canadian Prairie in terms of European history and memories. Sproxton’s Phantom Lake, also made of segmented autobiographical and fictional stories, hearsay, memories, and traces, presents space metonymically, constructing a multilayered and “deep” map of a mining town in Northern Manitoba’s Canadian Shield. As “deep” maps, both texts address questions of Canadian identity and culture, in particular, our identity as situated human beings.