Poem: ‘Selected Monsters’
Steven Heighton, 3 July 2008
for Barbara Gowdy
In Florence, circa 1460, Cosimo de’ Medici enclosed a mixed group of animals in a pen and invited Pope Pius II to attend the spectacle, which was meant to determine which beast was the most ferocious: the lion, the fighting bull, the bloodhound, the gorilla, or perhaps the giraffe – an animal then known in Europe as a Camelopard.
‘Holiness, with these...
