Richard Outram is known to be a difficult poet. His poems are often philosophical and densely allusive, to the point sometimes of near opacity. This not entirely unearned reputation has made him something of a poet’s poet, very highly esteemed by a small number of dedicated readers. But, as Carmine Starnino has argued in his recent book A Lover’s Quarrel, there is “another Outram” out there, one who does not need in-depth decoding by experts to be appreciated. Starnino singles out “Barbed Wire” as one of the finest products of that other Outram, and justly so. This profoundly moving occasional poem—one of very few overtly autobiographical pieces in Outram’s oeuvre—can be apprehended after a single reading by a non-specialist reader. This doesn’t mean that the poem yields its secrets easily; after reading this poem several dozen times, I still uncover previously unnoticed nuances in its lines.

As with any Outram poem, intrication plays a key role in how “Barbed Wire” works. The poem is woven every bit as tightly as the titular wire; the ABAB quatrains are formally apt, being two lines twisted together with “four short ends, sharp bevel-cut.” But there is also a looseness at play. “Interstices” are leitmotifs in Outram’s work; he is a poet who makes much of gaps, the spaces between people and things, the silences between words. The “ellipses” in the wedding rings do double-duty, as do many other words in the poem: they provide a sharp visual description of the bands, but they also alert the reader to the poem’s procedures, as Outram shifts, with little to no warning, from one image to another. It’s disconcerting to go from barbed wire, a tool used for involuntary containment and confinement, to wedding rings, symbols of voluntary loving union. And yet the poem convinces us, through the associative use of the word “conjoined,” that the comparison is apposite, suggesting that even the happiest of marriages involves some sacrifice of individuality. (It should be noted that Outram’s marriage to visual artist Barbara Howard—hard to imagine that “barbed” is an accidental pun—was such a happy marriage, as the two were not only devoted partners, but artistic collaborators as well.) This point is reinforced in the second and third stanzas, as it takes the reader a while to realize that Outram has shifted back from rings to wire, creating a literal con-fusion of two images at the same time that it creates a confusion, however fleeting, in the mind of the reader.

Outram makes another unheralded associative leap from his treatise on barbed wire to his father’s war experience, bringing violent death and degradation into the poem as counterpoint to love and loyalty. As with the comparison between wire and rings, this juxtaposition will not allow the reader to slip into complacent thought habits; the poem suggests that war is bound as closely to loyalty and love as it is to death and destruction—a fact that should come as no surprise to readers of war poets like Wilfred Owen. Even if “no one volunteered,” the killed were still brought back from the wire for burial.

The final surprise shift occurs in the first line of the last stanza. We think at first that “they” refers to the soldiers on the battlefield, but learn in short order that they are Outram and Howard’s fathers, standing not in mourning for their fallen comrades, but in celebration of their children’s union. In the poem’s gorgeous final line, Outram twists the poem’s strands, themes and tropes back together, “death” and “troth” both separated and united by a “bright entanglement.” As Amanda Jernigan points out in her HPW feature on “Story,” Outram is drawn to the union of apparent opposites. In this, he is a poet true to life in all its troubling contradictions and beautiful unities.