Man in Love

Marily Chapman was a freelance writer living in Kitchener, Ontario.

Man in Love is Richard Outram’s fourth book of poetry, excluding his Selected Poems, which was also published this year. That the author is intoxicated by “the universe of words,” that he sees this universe as endlessly fascinating and “inexhaustibly ramified,” and that he believes that his task is to delineate the dazzling complexity of this universe with as much clarity as possible is evident in every entry in this attractive volume. And for precisely these reasons, I would like to be able to say that I enjoyed this book. But I can not. While all of the poems had some line, image, or turn of phrase that engaged the reader’s soul, they also all seemed to contain some obstructive flaw that undermined these qualities — some unnecessary syntactical distortion, some contrived Latinate phrasing, some trite predictable rhyme scheme. Consider, for instance, the following:

Mortals who know of fatal juxtapositions; star-sime; lakewound arriving; the thin glitter of mica

In granite; O all contagious moonspawn spilled into the open folds of this uplifted fecund rose:

And even more distressing:

At his best, however, Outram achieves a clarity of vision that weds well with the exquisite woodcuts by his wife, Barbara Howard. Consider, for instance, the precision and economy of the first stanza of “Phases of the Full Moon”:

Generally speaking, I found the simpler poems more effective than those that were decked with the rhetorical ribbons of Outram’s cornucopic lexicon.