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Kenneth Sherman's collection Words for Elephant Man delves into the fascinating life of Joseph Merrick, the titular `Elephant Man' who came to prominence as a sideshow curiosity in England in the late nineteenth century. Sherman's spare, captivating verse gives a voice to Merrick's fraught and complex existence, and couples it with a genuine compassion quite distant from the chill of a gawking public.
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From the Author:
About the Author:
Words for Elephant Man came to me in a rush. The first draft was written in three weeks. I spent another month polishing the poems and fretting over structure, and the book was largely done. The story of John Merrick, a man born into poverty and afflicted with a dreadful disease, afforded my poetic imagination a considerable range. Victorian England served as mirror for our own times. The historical subject matter allowed the interspersion of lyrical poetry and nineteenth-century medical reports, legal documents and testimonies -- a weave that gives the work a documentary sensibility.
Yet at its heart Words for Elephant Man is not social commentary but spiritual testimony. I was going through a personal crisis and the figure of John Merrick served as a mask for my own experience. Writing the book was a release.
How should the story be told? The first version employed a chronological approach. When I showed the book to Dennis Lee he made the intelligent suggestion that I begin the book in medias res, and then use flashback to present Merrick's early years. Eli Mandel helped shape the ending of the book and suggested concluding with the pathology report on Merrick's skeleton. My friend, the versatile printmaker George Raab, created prints reminiscent of the nineteenth century, lending the book a haunting authenticity.
(Kenneth Sherman)Kenneth Sherman was born in Toronto in 1950. He has a BA from York University, where he studied with Eli Mandel and Irving Layton, and an MA in English Literature from the University of Toronto. While a student at York, Sherman co-founded and edited the literary journal Waves. From 1974--1975 he travelled extensively through Asia. He is a full-time faculty member at Sheridan College where he teaches Communications; he also teaches a course in creative writing at the University of Toronto.
In 1982, Sherman was writer-in-residence at Trent University. In 1986 he was invited by the Chinese government to lecture on contemporary Canadian literature at universities and government institutions in Beijing. In 1988, he received a Canada Council grant to travel through Poland and Russia. This experience inspired several of the essays in his book Void and Voice (1998). Sherman, author of the acclaimed Words for Elephant Man, and The Well: New and Selected Poems, lives in Toronto with his wife, Marie, an artist.
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- PublisherPorcupine's Quill
- Publication date2012
- ISBN 10 0889843503
- ISBN 13 9780889843509
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number2
- Number of pages96
- Rating
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Words for Elephant Man
Published by
The Porcupine's Quill
(2012)
ISBN 10: 0889843503
ISBN 13: 9780889843509
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Soft cover
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Book Description Soft cover. Condition: New. No Jacket. 2nd Edition. 'Man is a / fascinating animal', Kenneth Sherman writes, and it is this fascination that drives the narrative in Words for Elephant Man. Written in the voice of Joseph Merrick, the 'Elephant Man' plagued with a disfiguring condition that ravaged much of his body, Sherman reveals his subject to be more than just a living fascination. Sherman's Merrick, acutely observant, is equally fascinated by those around him as well. Using found lines from historical record interwoven with his own beautifully-rendered verse, Sherman's collection triumphs as a haunting, eloquent portrait of a man whose body was both disabler and enabler, a man who was both a commodity and a salesman, mechanical and organic, and whose extraordinary circumstances overshadowed the remarkably ordinary desires he shared with humanity. Sherman's Merrick is observant, clever and authentic, and possessed of a voice that resonates through the years and into the hearts and minds of readers. Seller Inventory # ABE-7571414967
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