Mogul Recollected

Roger Nash is a philosophy professor and author of Night Flying.

Richard Outram’s eighth book of poetry weaves a web of poems around
the 1836 drowning of an elephant off the New Brunswick coast. Outram
employs a poetic form of Kierkegaardian recollection to explore the
moral significance of the circus captivity that preceded this death. The
recollection seeks to rework traditional theology and give one
creature—and, by extension, all creatures—a destiny not inferior to
humankind’s, even though the elephant was used by us for frivolous and
ridiculous entertainment.

The web Outram weaves is a rich one, bejeweled with language, and
carrying intricate allusions to, or echoes of, other poets, such as
Blake, Manley Hopkins, and Ted Hughes. We must read deeply, and on
multiple levels, to find connecting threads in the web. “Good Book”
makes excellent criticism of literal readings of texts. Even so, is the
weave generally a close and coherent one? In “Mogul Amok,” the
elephant is presented as a cosmic divinity. The poem is striking in
itself, but does it do enough work to link divinity to the actual animal
drowned at sea?

At times, bejeweled language becomes precious in the pejorative sense.
In “Scrimshaw,” the self-conscious display of a phrase like “void
slicked vortex” takes attention away from the subject of the poem: the
awful death of a fellow creature. Archaisms like “twain” and
“nonce” have the same effect.

In a number of poems, Outram achieves imaginative empathy with the
elephant. “Compassion” transports us into Mogul’s mind, as he
relives incidents from his past. However, Mogul is not sufficiently
distinguished from other elephants; indeed, little close and vivid
knowledge of elephants is shown. In part because of this lack of
individualizing knowledge, empathy inadvertently comes close to ridicule
in some poems. In “Covenant,” a stereotypically heavy elephant is
supported on a rainbow; not enough poetic theological work is done with
the rainbow as an image of Covenant to save Mogul from being cartoonish
here.