`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.''