How to Draw a Rhinoceros, the first book of poems by Canadian writer, scholar, and lawyer Kate Sutherland, mines centuries of rhinoceros representations in art and literature to document the history of European and North American encounters with the animal-from the elephant-rhinoceros battles staged by monarchs in the Middle Ages; the rhinomania that took hold in France and later in Italy in response to the European travels of Clara the 'Dutch' Rhinoceros in the mid-1700s; the menageries and circuses of the Victorian era; the exploits of celebrated twentieth-century hunters like Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway; and the trade in rhinoceros horn artefacts that thrives online today. Along the way, it explores themes of colonialism, animal welfare, and conservation. Sutherland was inspired on this poetic path by Clara, an eighteenth-century rhinoceros she first encountered in porcelain form in an exhibit of ceramic animals at Toronto's Gardiner Museum. This chance experience set her off on a grand quest to learn all she could of Clara's story, and resulted in a collection that combines Robert Kroetschian documentary poetics with the meticulous research and environmental passion of Elizabeth Kolbert, to successfully examine the centuries-long path of the rhinoceros that's brought it to the brink of global extinction. Readers of contemporary poetry, as well as those audiences interested in natural history, animal welfare, and conservation, and people who have followed Sutherland's scholarly and literary careers (and their intersections in her most recent academic work that focuses on law and poetry), will relish the rich detail and odd tales of historical rhinoceroses and the people who have kept, shown, and traded in them, as depicted using a range of poetic techniques that only a critical eye like Sutherland's could deliver.--$cProvided by publisher.
Authors
- Control Number Identifier
- CaOOCEL
- Description conventions
- rda
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- C811/.6
- Dewey Decimal Edition Number
- 23
- Distributor
- Canadian Electronic Library (Firm),
- General Note
- Poems Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
- ISBN
- 9781771662628 9781771662604
- LCCN
- PR9199.3.S872
- LCCN Item number
- A6 2016eb
- Modifying agency
- CaBNVSL
- Original cataloging agency
- CaOONL
- Physical Description | Extent
- 1 electronic text (81 pages)
- Published in
- Ottawa, Ontario
- Publisher or Distributor Number
- CaOOCEL
- Rights
- Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
- System Control Number
- (CaBNVSL)kck00237328 (OCoLC)954271883 (CaOOCEL)452278
- System Details Note
- Mode of access: World Wide Web
- Transcribing agency
- CaOONL
Table of Contents
- a natural history of the rhinoceros 8
- how to draw a rhinoceros 12
- dürer’s rhinoceros 15
- elephant v. rhinoceros 16
- according to the apothecary 23
- rhinoceros odyssey 26
- magrath the giant and the rhinoceros 38
- the wild beast men 40
- transactions of the london zoologicalsociety’s menagerie, 1834–1875 52
- o’brien’s four shows 55
- great family of giants 56
- by any other name 57
- the fun of hunting them 59
- officials said 63
- going, going, gone 65
- conservation 68
- clara’s favourite tipple 69
- clara incognito 70
- clara the collector 71
- clara delights in her status as muse 72
- clara inspires the scribes 72
- clara canary girl 73
- clara is ready for her close-up 74
- clara joins the secretarial pool 75
- clara goes to law school 76
- clara in space 77
- notes on sources 79
