BOOK REVIEW - South of North: Images of Canada
Submitted by WebAdmin on Tue, 06/17/2008 - 09:47.
By Richard Outram
Illustrated By Thoreau MacDonald
The Porcupine's Quill, 2007, $16.95
This book of short, sometimes wildly colored, sometimes black-and-white poems that follow the seasons was commissioned by the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto as a text that was then set to music by composer Srul Irving Glick. The poems are songs themselves:
WIFE
In one of those low, cloud-covered,
moonless evenings,
there is his lantern moving about
after supper,
down by the barn's huge darkness.
In January,
nothing whatsoever under the sun
is brighter.
Illustrated with Thoreau MacDonald's woodcuts and ink drawings, this book, like Valentines, is for grown-up lovers.
In February 2005, Outram sat out on his porch one night until he froze to death. His wife of 48 years, Barbara, had died three years earlier, during hip replacement surgery, and he'd never recovered from the loss. "Her beauty," he wrote to a friend, "was beyond all comprehension, her touch was mortal. Ever-redemptive. None could deserve her. She was my love. We were lovers. What more could anyone ask of the Personal universe. Save, in good time, the dark common, our earned deaths."
Illustrated By Thoreau MacDonald
The Porcupine's Quill, 2007, $16.95
This book of short, sometimes wildly colored, sometimes black-and-white poems that follow the seasons was commissioned by the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto as a text that was then set to music by composer Srul Irving Glick. The poems are songs themselves:
WIFE
In one of those low, cloud-covered,
moonless evenings,
there is his lantern moving about
after supper,
down by the barn's huge darkness.
In January,
nothing whatsoever under the sun
is brighter.
Illustrated with Thoreau MacDonald's woodcuts and ink drawings, this book, like Valentines, is for grown-up lovers.
In February 2005, Outram sat out on his porch one night until he froze to death. His wife of 48 years, Barbara, had died three years earlier, during hip replacement surgery, and he'd never recovered from the loss. "Her beauty," he wrote to a friend, "was beyond all comprehension, her touch was mortal. Ever-redemptive. None could deserve her. She was my love. We were lovers. What more could anyone ask of the Personal universe. Save, in good time, the dark common, our earned deaths."
