Dove Legend"Dove Legend" is a pungent pot pourri for Outram readers. It binds together the shorter poem cycles, festive holiday broadsheets, occasional verses and love poems, and a number of highly disguised and thus revealing autobiographical pieces, all written over the past ten years (roughly since Outram's retirement from stage production at the CBC). In a sense, these are only the decades leftovers. In the same span, we have been treated to a series of book-length poetry cycles, "Hiram and Jenny," "Mogul Recollected," and "Benedict Abroad." A reader of "Dove Legend" cannot help but think of the book's relationship to all the other work Outram has published in these same years, if not to his career in general. In short, to come across this ample inventory is to find yourself wondering, as others have before, why Outram isn't better known than he is.' |
