sewn paper
Poetry
1988
136 pages
ISBN 0-88984-118-7
$8.95

Hiram and Jenny

Richard Outram

Hiram and Jenny concerns the comings and goings, the deeds and evasions, the Private Poems and Sacred Ejaculations, the maunderings and heroics, the reflections and refractions of past, present and future, of one Hiram and his lady friend Jenny, together with their cast of somewhat skewed friends and often amicable foes, as often as not relatives, who live in and around a small town somewhere in the Canadian Maritimes.

`Outram's latest and perhaps most accomplished book, Hiram and Jenny, is a good place to begin an exploration of Outram's writing. It is a cohesive book, not a collection of random poems. At its core are man and woman, the multitudinous couple, sitting at the water's edge and leading lives which, like those of Adam and Eve, contain the whole of mankind - every thought, every war, every discovery, every death. At work in Outram's poems is that creature derided in so much of our accepted literature: the moralist, the person who, in the simplest terms, is concerned with how we behave. In many of the poems, a casual reader might be deceived by the humour, by the cartoon-like slang of Hiram and Jenny's speech, but Outram is never merely whimsical. Behind the wit are nagging unfashionable questions about body and soul, intimations of God in nature, assertations of the ineluctable power of love which binds us to the fabric of the universe.' Alberto Manguel, Saturday Night

`These narrative poems cover many topics and happenings in the lives of our protagonists. The author deals with mundane events in a whimsical fashion which is often humourous, sometimes sad. There is nothing extraordinary or heroic about any of these people or incidents, but Outram manages to see the bizarre or ridiculous side of a situation, and this saves the book from banality. There is also a spiritual quality which balances the vernacular style. Richard Outram may well be a Canadian Dylan Thomas; I suspect the Hiram and Jenny pieces would lend themselves wonderfully to being read aloud. Whether history will place him as one of this century's great lyric story-tellers remains to be seen. At any rate this is a captivating book.' - Canadian Book Review Annual

Photo by Barbara Howard

Richard Outram was born in Canada in 1930. He graduated from the University of Toronto (English and Philosophy) and worked for many years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a stagehand crew leader. He wrote more than twenty books, four of these published by the Porcupine's Quill (Man in Love [1985], Hiram and Jenny [1988], Mogul Recollected [1993], and Dove Legend [2001]). He won the City of Toronto Book Award in 1999 for his collection Benedict Abroad (St Thomas Poetry Series). His work is the subject of a book-length study, `Her Kindled Shadow...': An Introduction to the Work of Richard Outram, by Peter Sanger (Nova Scotia: The Antigonish Review, 2001/2002).

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.

Contents © 2003 The Porcupine's Quill, Inc. - Updated: 24 August 2003 by Tim Inkster
The Porcupine's Quill, 68 Main Street, Erin, Ontario CANADA N0B 1T0
Telephone (519) 833-9158 Fax (519) 833-9845 e-mail pql@sentex.net

The Porcupine's Quill is remarkable in Canadian publishing in that most of the physical production
of our books is completed in-house at the shop on the Main Street of Erin Village.

We print on a twenty-five inch Heidelberg KORD, typically onto acid-free Zephyr Antique laid.
The sheets are then folded, and sewn into signatures on a 1907 model Smyth National Book Sewing machine.