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ix A Note on the Cover The bird depicted in Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch (1654), the painting reproduced on the cover of this book, is a European goldfinch. It is not a bird likely to be encountered in Canada. Because this book interrogates a particular kind of attention to specific bird species in the context of Canadian poetry, some explanation for the choice of this image is in order. As soon as I saw the painting, I knew I wanted it for the cover. Its Europeanness is in keeping both with my discussion of British Romantic poets (and McKay’s own response to that tradition; McKay doesn’t limit his avian subjects to Canadian species, though most of the birds he writes about are encountered in Canada) and with my concept of multiple ornithologies of desire (scientific and literary), which emerge from and connect to a kind of Enlightenment rationality not limited to Canada. Fabritius’s painting demonstrates both the historical and the very immediate trajectory of a human desire to know the avian other by capturing and looking ... and painting and writing, I suppose. One of my goals with this book is to position McKay within a Canadian as well as an international (mostly European and American) tradition of eco- and avian poetry/poetics. In that sense, the Fabritius cover anticipates that broader scope. This page intentionally left blank ...

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