sewn paper
POETRY / Canadian
September 2007
128 pages
EAN 978-0-88984-298-4
$16.95
South of North: Images of Canada
Richard Outram, with drawings by Thoreau MacDonald
For this collection of uncommon plainsong, editors Rosemary Kilbourn
and Anne Corkett have chosen poems and illustrations
by a poet and an artist who both recognized that simplicity and restraint are
among the most difficult of achievements in art.
Richard Outram has been described by Alberto Manguel as `one of
the finest poets in the English language'. A year before his
death in 2005, Outram collected together a series of 115 unpublished poems
that had been written in response to
a request from the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto
in celebration of the Club's ninetieth anniversary.
The work was intended to
provide a text for a song cycle commissioned
from the composer Srul Irving Glick.
Glick selected eight of the poems and then set them for baritone/mezzo-soprano
and piano; the work was performed with the title of South of North:
In Honour of Thoreau MacDonald 1901-1989.
Thoreau MacDonald was the son of J.E.H. MacDonald, himself
a member of the Arts and Letters Club. Outram had
long admired MacDonald's drawing,
and Thoreau's spare, evocative pictures drew from Richard a
different aspect of his wordsmith's craft.
In South of North Outram's poems are quick, vividly
immediate, instant of access. They are the visible, audible
delights of a consummate poet's empathy with an artist as
passionately involved -- as Richard was himself -- with animals, country and the
practical accomplishment of tasks. This volume, in words and pictures,
portrays a landscape that is distinctly rural -- a weathervane, dogwood
in a marsh, the whitened skeleton of a vole in a fallow
field. Tantramar Marsh, the Saugeen River and the
horses of Bonavista. A summer storm building over Cobourg; the hefty bulk of
a snapping turtle surfacing, trailing a rank ooze. Thirty-five illustrations
in total.
Rosemary Kilbourn's introductory Remarks, delivered at the book launch in October, 2007, are available on our FaceBook page.
Jeffery Donaldson's Four Paragraphs
on Richard Outram's South of North are also available on FaceBook.
Photo by Barbara Howard
Outram married painter and wood engraver Barbara Howard in 1957. Together they produced many exemplary books and broadsides under their own private press imprint, the Gauntlet Press. In 1999 both poet and artist were celebrated with an exhibition of their many collaborations at the Robarts Library, University of Toronto, and with 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 continues to be featured on the Porcupine's Quill web site.
Thoreau MacDonald (1901-1989) was born in Toronto, Ontario. His formative years were spent in rural areas near High Park, and in Thornhill, north of Toronto. Thoreau's drawings and writings about the wild plants and animals native to these regions reflect his deep concern for and support of nature conservation.
Thoreau created thousands of images including pencil sketches, pen and brush drawings, stencils, linocuts, woodcuts, silkscreens, watercolours and oils. He is perhaps best remembered for creating detailed line drawings of natural objects set within their stylized habitats.
Under his Woodchuck Press imprint, Thoreau designed and published sixteen books or booklets of his own work. His drawings and calligraphy have adorned hundreds of books written by others most notable among which are Flint and Feather, E. Pauline Johnson, 1924; Lyrics of Earth, Archibald Lampman, 1925; The Chopping Bee and other Laurentian Stories, Brother Marie Victorin, 1925; West by East, J. E. H. MacDonald, 1933; Maria Chapdelaine, Louis Hémon, translated by W. H. Blake, 1938; Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1942; and David and Other Poems, Earle Birney, 1942.
Thoreau MacDonald was the son of Group of Seven member J. E. H. MacDonald. His work is found in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Hart House at the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection amongst others. `
