This volume presents the first posthumous panorama of Outram's work and achievement. It includes an interview, a lecture, an elegy, and new essays by poets and writers who admire Outram's commitment to “concision and precision” in language -- Brian Bartlett, Michael Carbert, Robert Denham, Jeffery Donaldson, Steven Heighton, Amanda Jernigan, Eric Ormsby, Ingrid Ruthig, Peter Sanger, and Zachariah Wells.

Poet Richard Outram, who died in January, 2005, has been quietly lauded as a major figure in twentieth-century English-Canadian literature. Yet in his lifetime, despite international attention, he received only minor recognition from Canada's literary establishment. Born in 1930, in Oshawa, Ontario, he studied English and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Northrop Frye and Emil Fackenheim, who were among his professors, remained important figures for him in the example they had set of "living an examined life, the life of the mind." Outram married the artist Barbara Howard in 1957, and under their Gauntlet Press imprint, they produced many fine collaborative books and broadsides. Between 1966 and 2001, Outram also published nine collections of poems with commercial presses, of which Benedict Abroad won the 1999 Toronto Book Award.

Ingrid Ruthig, writer, poet, visual artist, and once-practising architect, is the author of This Being, which won the League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best debut collection of poems in Canada (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2016). Her work has appeared widely – most recently in Resisting Canada (Véhicule Press) and Am, Be: The Poetry of Wayne Clifford (Frog Hollow Press). A 2018 Hawthornden Fellow and winner of a Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize, Ruthig is also the author of Slipstream (a poem sequence & artist’s bookwork) and the chapbook of poems Synesthete II, as well as the editor of several volumes, including The Essential Elizabeth Brewster (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2021) and David Helwig: Essays on His Works (Guernica Editions, 2018). She lives near Toronto.

Ingrid Ruthig's profile page