'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.'

Outram was born in Canada in 1930. He was a graduate of the University of Toronto (English and Philosophy), and worked for many years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a stagehand crew leader. He wrote more than twenty books, four of these published by the Porcupine's Quill (Man in Love [1985], Hiram and Jenny [1988], Mogul Recollected [1993], and Dove Legend [2001]). He won the City of Toronto Book Award in 1999 for his collection Benedict Abroad (St Thomas Poetry Series). His poetry is the subject of a significant work of literary criticism, Through Darkling Air: The Poetry of Richard Outram, by Peter Sanger (Gaspereau Press, 2010).

Richard Outram died in 2005.

Richard Outram's profile page

'Richard Outram's Dove Legend is a complex assemblage of rare and invented nouns wired together with speech rhythms collected from a variety of dialects, discourses, and periods. At its best, Outram's poetry moves rapidly between registers and modes and creates a vertiginous effect in which the ''actual is abstract'' and the ordinary is ornate. He fashions baroque complexities out of everything from philosophical musings to jive talk, Miltonic invocations to sea shanties. In the long poems ''Tradecraft'' and ''Millefleur,'' for example, Outram propels the narrative by continually changing the tonal register and toying with the reader's expectations.'

Canadian Literature

'Outram is never at any time anyone less than a poet armed and a poet prepared to prophesy.'

The New Quarterly

'Outram is never at any time anyone less than a poet armed and a poet prepared to prophesy.'

The New Quarterly

'Outram's work demonstrates the truth of Pound's claim that formal verse structure ''exalts the reader, making him feel that he is in contact with something more finely arranged than the commonplace.'' There is very little of the commonplace on any level in Dove Legend & Other Poems, a wonderful and wonderfully demanding book.'

Books in Canada