Margaret Atwood once said the four-letter epithet most dreadful to a writer’s ears is the word “icon.” Consider Robert Kroetsch, equipped with his first new book of poems in 10 years. How can his new writing clear a space for itself beyond the shadow cast by a mountain range of expectations? In The Hornbooks of Rita K., Kroetsch shows how brilliantly a wily intelligence can slip the bonds of expectation to create surprising and challenging new work.

Kroetsch’s writing releases the potential energy trapped in everyday forms of words: things like ledgers and seed catalogues. Here he turns to the hornbook, an early type of primer for children learning their letters. Resembling hand-held mirrors, hornbooks get their name from a transparently thin slice of cow’s horn that protected the lesson sheet from wear. This image of easily-grasped writing, with “the clarity of the exact and solitary page,” is just what Rita K.’s poems do not provide. So we are told by Raymond, an editor sorting through the burial mounds of “hornbook” poems in her prairie farmhouse.

Raymond plays several roles. Part archeologist, part “weak-eyed translator,” he’s also Rita’s back-door man, the 60-year-old lover of a poet who is now “a goner,” an absent figure who “abjures sense as we think we know it” and who “tells us there is another possibility in language and … is on her way to asking what it is.” Raymond claims that Rita disappeared while viewing “Twilight Arch” by minimalist and conceptualist visual artist James Turrell. Like Turrell, Kroetsch uses the power of the frame to direct our consciousness. For a writer, this means writing oneself into a corner, then vanishing the way Rita disappears into her one-page poems.

What’s left? The hornbook image points back to a primary kind of writing, but also beyond writing’s end, to the blank transparent frame that makes the available light of awareness available as art. And there’s much more than just this going on in The Hornbooks of Rita K. In other words, this is a playful, maddening, skeptical, artfully empty, fulfilling maze of words and ideas that only Robert Kroetsch could construct.