Content area
Full Text
Loving and Leaving
Richard Outram
Dove Legend. Porcupine's Quill $14.95
David Solway
The Lover's Progress. Porcupine's Quill $14.95
Glen Sorestad
Leaving Holds Me Here: Selected Poems. Thistledown P $18.95
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. However, such a cornucopia of language conceals a strange kind of poverty. Outram's poems are brimming with verbal virtuosity, but many are curiously empty of feeling. Behind the artifice is a troubling void, in which archaic speech is frequently exalted into obsolescence. At its worst-as in the poem where Outram describes dancers in a Toronto pavilion as "quick knee-tremblers / that might to lewdness of the dance rude clodpolls lead"-Outram's syntax is as gaudy as the pink palm trees in the retouched cover photograph. On the other hand, the "flamingopink silk" in the title poem belongs to an ensemble whose elegance is striking. To his credit, moreover, Outram satirizes his own high rhetoric in "Island Residents," as well as making poignant use...