sewn paper
Ms Cassie broadsides
Poetry
March 2001
184 pages
ISBN 0-88984-221-3
$14.95
Dove Legend
Richard Outram
`Dove Legend is a pungent pot pourri for Outram readers. It binds together the
shorter poem cycles, festive holiday broadsheets, occasional verses and love poems, and
a number of highly disguised and thus revealing autobiographical pieces, all written
over the past ten years (roughly since Outram's retirement from stage production at the CBC).
In a sense, these are only the deades leftovers. In the same span, we have been treated to
a series of book-length poetry cycles, Hiram and Jenny, Mogul Recollected,
and Benedict Abroad. A reader of Dove Legend cannot help but think of the book's
relationship to all the other work Outram has published in these same years, if not to his
career in general. In short, to come across this ample inventory is to find yourself
wondering, as others have before, why Outram isn't better known than he is.' `Outram's work demonstrates the truth of Pound's claim that formal verse structure
``exalts the reader, making him feel that he is in contact with something more
finely arranged than the commonplace.'' There is very little of the commonplace on
any level in Dove Legend & Other Poems, a wonderful and wonderfully demanding book.' `Richard Outram's Dove Legend is a complex assemblage of rare and
invented nouns wired together with speech rhythms collected from a
variety of dialects, discourses, and periods. At its best, Outram's
poetry moves rapidly between registers and modes and creates a
vertiginous effect in which the "actual is abstract" and the ordinary is
ornate. He fashions baroque complexities out of everything from
philosophical musings to jive talk, Miltonic invocations to sea
shanties. In the long poems "Tradecraft" and "Millefleur," for example,
Outram propels the narrative by continually changing the tonal register
and toying with the reader's expectations.' `Outram is never at any time anyone less than a poet armed and a poet prepared to prophesy.' `Richard Outram is one of the finest poets in the English language.'
- Jeffrey Donaldson, Books in Canada
- Robert Moore, Books in Canada
- Canadian Literature
- Peter Sanger, The New Quarterly
- Alberto Manguel
Photo by Barbara Howard
Outram married painter and wood engraver Barbara Howard in 1957. Together, they produced many fine books and broadsides under their imprint, the Gauntlet Press. In 1999, poet and artist were celebrated with an exhibition of their work at the Robarts Library, University of Toronto, and the publication of a special issue of The Devil's Artisan: A Journal of the Printing Arts (Number 44). A cyber-exhibition of Gauntlet Press broadsides, entitled Ms Cassie, is featured on the Porcupine's Quill web site.
Richard Outram, stricken by grief over the loss of his beloved Barbara, took his life by his own hand in January of 2005.