Dove Legend

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.

Richard Outram has been publishing poetry for over forty years. A number
of his volumes have appeared, like this one, from public presses, but
many have also been hand-designed and privately printed by the Gauntlet
Press operated by himself and his artist wife, Barbara Howard.

Outram is a difficult but rewarding poet. He can be as allusive and as
intellectually challenging as Eliot or Stevens, and his exuberant
vocabulary can strain the resources of standard dictionaries as well as
dictionaries of slang. His attitudes are far-ranging, and are well
summed up in Dove Legend by lines from “Eros Incarnate”: “The
sacred proved / By the profane.” Add to all that his extraordinary
technical virtuosity, and one can understand why Alberto Manguel should
describe him as “one of the finest poets in the English language.”

Dove Legend, which gathers together a number of his recent privately
printed volumes, contains some of his most intricate and also some of
his most accessible poems. The central section, “Tradecraft,”
consists of a long poem in which continual references to King Lear (the
poem appears to be narrated by Edgar as “Poor Tom”) are interspersed
with the criminal lingo spoken in John Le Carré’s Circus novels. But
if that is rather heady fare for some readers, the other six parts
contain less taxing poems covering a wide range from the delicately
erotic (“On Our Anniversary”) to the eloquently lighthearted
(“Some marriages, so we are informed, are made in Heaven. / And some
marriages rather evidently are not”). Another section, “Around and
About the Toronto Islands,” is a tribute to local place, and can find
poetry in unlikely subjects such as graffiti-carved picnic tables or
produce teasing humor (“Island Residents” are “squatters,
fly-by-night,” living in “ramshackle dwellings”—but turn out to
be black-crowned night-herons!). There are even some personal poems
(unusual for Outram) including the delightful “Stage Crew,”
recalling the “punks and drunks and aesthetes” he met while working
as a stagehand crew-leader for the CBC.

A rich collection.