South of North: Images of Canada.

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This book is as unexpected as it is welcome: a cache of hitherto unpublished poems by the late Richard Outram. They were written in three months for a song cycle commissioned from the late Srul Irving Glick by the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto in 1998. Glick chose eight out of a total of 115 poems. This volume includes 87 of them, including all but one of those set to music.

Here the poems are linked not to music but to graphic art, since they are interspersed with 40 drawings by Thoreau MacDonald. The circumstances that resulted in South of North were both appropriate and happy. Outram (a longtime member of the Arts and Letters Club, then celebrating its 90th birthday) considered MacDonald (the son of J.E.H. MacDonald, a member of the Group of Seven who had also belonged to the club) “the finest graphic artist of them all,” to cite Anne Corbett and Rosemary Kilbourn, who selected both poems and drawings.

Outram’s early poetic work is remarkable for its allusive complexity and exuberant variety, but these are not the qualities prominent here. His later verse tended to be more direct, more easily accessible, and closer to MacDonald’s ideal of focusing on the essentials of a landscape. These poems carry that trend further. They are short (never more than a page), and primarily descriptive.

It is a book best read slowly, a few poems (and drawings) at a time. “Maple,” one of the shortest, serves as an example: “In the molten of late autumn / this crimson-ochre billow, / inflamed in the rough gold / field, leaps to the sun’s eye.” For a full effect, it needs to be spoken aloud to bring out the remarkable assonantal echoes (“molten … autumn”), the rhythmic beat of the last two lines, the consonantal pithiness, all of which illustrate the technical expertise of a poetic master.

The Porcupine’s Quill, as usual, has provided its accustomed skills in elegant design, typeface, and layout to match the standards of the poetry and the drawings.