The Essential Richard Outram is an elegant, affordable selection of poems by one of Canada's great poets. By turns theatrical and philosophical -- and often both at once -- Outram is always intimately attuned to the wonders and the workings of language. This volume gathers well-loved lyrics alongside poems unpublished in Outram's lifetime: there is much here for both long-time readers of Outram's work and readers new to his oeuvre.

Outram was born in Canada in 1930. He was a graduate of the University of Toronto (English and Philosophy), and worked for many years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a stagehand crew leader. He wrote more than twenty books, four of these published by the Porcupine's Quill (Man in Love [1985], Hiram and Jenny [1988], Mogul Recollected [1993], and Dove Legend [2001]). He won the City of Toronto Book Award in 1999 for his collection Benedict Abroad (St Thomas Poetry Series). His poetry is the subject of a significant work of literary criticism, Through Darkling Air: The Poetry of Richard Outram, by Peter Sanger (Gaspereau Press, 2010).

Richard Outram died in 2005.

Richard Outram's profile page

About a Poem

Caroline Adderson on Richard Outram's 'Mogul's Eye'

Mogul's Eye

Did not survive fire and water, nor earth, nor air;
not the cumbrous elements. Nor did it become
quintessence, numberless as thou seest. No.
It is closed, clothed in darkness for all time.

Mogul's eye was the still centre, the sometime
calm in the loomed elephant rage to be.
Wherein it mirrored the creature sun.

Mogul's eye had looked on eternal light
grooming the endless orient riverine grasslands;
piercing the overlapped canopy of the unfelled forest;
burning stark verticals in high mountain passes;
knifing through chinks in the slats of a boxcar,
holding the motes mingled in shafts of gold;
tangling snarls in the steel mesh of enclosures;
rebounding blaze from a bucket of living water;
quenched forever at last in Penobscot Bay.

Mogul, alone among other beasts,
in common with man, could weep,
and did, real tears from his small eye.
In common with man, not without cause.
He drowned in salt water.

Being not man nor angel but beast, Mogul
saw not through his eye but with it life
in the myriad present: which is immortal.

And he beheld, as he was beholden to,
what he became: his one death.

This is the final poem in Richard Outram's 1993 book, Mogul Recollected. Taken on its own, it cannot convey the cumulative power of the collection, which concerns a true event, the 1836 sinking of a ship in Penobscot Bay. The Royal Tar was transporting a circus when, during a storm, the mishandled boiler caught fire. Terrified by the waves, but also the flames, Mogul the elephant refused to jump into the ocean. Instead he placed his forelegs on the deck railing, which then collapsed under his weight causing him toplunge onto a full life raft. All, including the elephant, drowned.

The poems look at the tragedy, which would otherwise be lost to history, from every possible angle, and here, in the final poem, the reader, already forced to contemplate not only the significance of death by fire and water of a fellow creature, but also its terrible treatment in life, now must look Mogul directly in the eyeand ask the age-old question: why must we suffer? The question is, of course, as unanswerable as the darkness of the death we are ''beholden'' to is inevitable. (Death and the ability to suffer are two more things we have in common with elephants beyond the abilityto cry.) Yet Mogul's brave eye, ''the still centre,'' ever sought out the light, which in turn ever diminished as he moved from freedom to captivity, until it was just the ''rebounding blaze'' from the burningship reflected in the water bucket of slavery. Still he saw it, ''eternal'' light. He saw with that light-seeking eye, instead of through it.

In none of the four or five times that I've read Mogul Recollected, have I been able to get through it without sobbing for an elephant who perished more than a century and a half ago. The poems are a call to compassion, which literally means ''to suffer together.'' We suffer with the animals (though somewhat less so than they, I would venture), yet it is they who teach us how we might finally reach immortality. With their particular wisdom -- instinct, intuition, creature insight -- they perceive ''life in the myriad present,'' which goes on and on, recorded or not.

Caroline Adderson, 2010; Shambhala Sun magazine

In her selections from the late Ontario poet Richard Outram's more than 40-year career, Amanda Jernigan has crafted a mixtape of his poetry. Like any cherished mixtape, Jernigan's selection allows for her own expression while also leaving her recipient's own interpretation free to develop. Her goal isn't didactic, but to compile Outram's work that most affected her and then see how one responds to it. This is the purpose Outram's own work, and makes Jernigan's coy use of her own personal collection such an emotionally effective tribute. It's about you, Jernigan and Outram all at once. The ever dualist -- with lines like, ''Then let this moment, gentled, be / ephemeral as thought, / or disembodied love. It is. / And is not'' -- the mix is only fitting for Outram.

Telegraph-Journal

'In The Essential Richard Outram, the writer's formative poetic years are represented, in which formidable potential is shown nearly realized. True genius lies in his later poems. ... But his most affecting poems are those Outram never released in his lifetime, which are personal in a way only poetry can achieve.'

ForeWord Reviews

The latest installment of the Essential Poets Series from the Porcupine's Quill delivers in same manner as its predecessors. An elegant selection of poems from Outram's extensive career provides the unfamiliar with a succinct glimpse of this great Canadian poet's vision and versatility, while giving followers of his a warming selection deftly drawn from three decades of work and woven into a beautiful sequence of its own.

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