No one should be surprised to learn that the first scholar to offer a full book-length treatment of Outram's work is a poet himself, and a very fine poet at that. In his own poems and in his other critical commentary (on John Thompson for instance), Peter Sanger shares with his subject Outram a love of words, an appetite for the linguistic or semantic foxhunt, a jeweller's eye for the intricacies of literary form, a midwife's gentle handling of the freshly delivered literary-historical curio or bibliographic treasure. Sanger's essay has had to map out, for the first time, and with scant help, the arc of Outram's varied career, its formal and stylistic attributes, its areas of concern, its coherent patterns, complexities, unities and preoccupations.
While Sanger never strays too far from a reassuring chronological order in his discussion of the poems, his speculations are those of a map maker, with their prospective and spatial unities, where everything is oriented in relation to everything else. Unified perception (as ironic illusion, and as revelation), is indeed one of the themes of Outram's poetry, and the challenge of anyone who would try to see it whole. On the book-title phrase "her kindled shadow" (extracted from "At the Bijou"), Sanger writes that the nature of the subject, here the shadowy trace of a bird taking flight, "is not double and divided, but single." He goes on:

"For the dove exists in the instant moment, not
in the before and after of chronological time;
and she exists at the intersection of all places,
not in a place here and another elsewhere,
despite her apparent flights to and from."

The passage might also characterize the elusive spar, the flighty thereness of Outram's poetry that Sanger captures.
Sanger's writing here, with its wide discursive meander, beautifully mirrors the subject he describes and offers something very close to a prose version of Outram's own erotic make-em-wait-for-it teasings of revelation in his poems. Elsewhere Sanger will track recurrent Biblical references, literary echoes and allusions, or find cross-fertilizing correspondences in and among Outram's own abiding dramatis personae. He will even risk the peril of paraphrase and return to tell of it. In short, Sanger's volume is a faithful and philosophically engaging introduction to the poems, a kind of guided tour through a retrospective exhibition. Sanger offers a careful description of the artifact itself, its chronology, sequence, historical circumstance, its relation to pieces he might point to on other walls: he takes a watchful step closer to the painterly detailing, a step back with a sweep of the arm around the room. If a reader gets tired on his feet it is only that so much careful attention is paid and in turn encouraged. It may be that the best way to approach Sanger's Outram is in a series of visits, where certain pages-like postcards of the solitary originals-may be fastened upon, say, no more than two or three of one's favourites, and brought away for further reflection under a private lamplight.
To think of the afterlife of these two books, that is, their life in the hands of readers from here on, but also to ask the question of what-next in relation to Outram's on-going career and reception, begs a reading of the closing poem in Dove Legend, the title poem itself. It calls to mind all the issues of continuance, conclusion, resolve, resignation and determination that are the abiding concerns of this book and that seem appropriate to any dreaming about afterlife, poetic or otherwise:

I batter upward
spiral to lightblaze in rare air &

my marvelous chambered heart
lest it bloodburst falls

a crimson fleck a vermilion iota
unnoticed down & down & down

through pillared fire of mansioned clouds
brightwoven from all horizon & far

below my marvellous heart settles
at last to rest in the plundered breast-

feathered nest of a vivid resplendent quetzal.
Soon looted by feral urchins, it may be seen,

set as a ruby & reckoned priceless,
in the nit-infested, flamingo-pink silk

turban of one of the lesser steadfast
Prophets of mundane doom,

by some who have eyes to see still
marvellous still beating.

What is at stake might be summed up in a simple question: has the bird already fallen, to have its afterlife as a rare ruby in a turban, or is it still rising in flight? The syntax is ingeniously fork-tongued. We might on the one hand be looking at a sentence argument along these lines: my marvellous beating heart by some who have eyes to see is still marvellous still beating. On the other hand, if you sort through the subordinations and wave your requirement of a main verb to complete the subject "heart", you might conclude that the heart has indeed fallen, that it has ended up in the rather unpromising "nit-infested" silk turban of a lesser prophet (it is hard not to feel that the passage itself prophesies a certain kind of bad criticism; only there, in its fallen state, as a ruby in a turban, can it be seen as still marvellous still beating, enjoying some kind of afterlife for those who have eyes to see it for the still living gem it is.) We are left with two equally accommodated alternatives. Either the heart still beats, thank god, for those who have eyes to follow it upwards, or it has died and been redeemed into at least some kind of afterlife, thank god, for those who have eyes to recognize it there. A reader might find something in the argument of a struggle and self-accounting in Outram's own poetic style. There is an imperative to verbal excess and intensity in Outram's work ("an upward / spiral to lightblaze in rare air"), an intensity that sustains itself lest in letting down its guise and guile it come to be seen as a poor decorative accessory in the costuming of a mere "prophet of mundane doom." The gambit of intensity resonates for both the speaker and the poem he speaks in.
I find this poem deeply moving as a closing word on a decade of extraordinary work, culminating in Dove Legend, and promising continuing successes to come. Consider that the "chambered heart" here both comprises chambers still beating, and is chambered itself, i.e., imprisoned at last in its long-foretold resting place. Even the phrase "batter upwards" beautifully captures the kind of grappling scramble into spirit that we find everywhere in Outram. There would be nothing so spiritually liberating as to fold the terms of continuing life into those of an afterlife continuing to the point where you could not tell which was which, and so in a sense had to claim your portion in both. In Dove Legend, Outram offers a poetry that struggles marvellously to stay above the plundered nest, and a poetry that accepts and makes peace with the afterlife it can already foretell, and be seen as thriving in still, by those-like Peter Sanger for instance-who have eyes to see.