Mount Clutter (Grove Press Poetry) [Paperback]

Sarah Lindsay (Author)

Book Description

Series: Grove Press Poetry | Publication Date: September 19, 2002

Sarah Lindsay's poems have been hailed as "dark-edged ... with a buoying sense of respect-for the different, the unexpected and the challenging." (Publishers Weekly) Lindsay's new collection, Mount Clutter, is the product of an immensely original and exhilarating poetic sensibility, ranging wide across a highly distinctive imaginary landscape. In a voice that is distinctly her own, Lindsay probes the uncharted territories of history's curious little corners, reanimating obscure accounts of strange discoveries and bizarre scientific findings. A stunning sequence on the discovery of the Bufo Islands imagines what it means to encounter something as yet unnamed, unknown to human history, but bursting with possibilities. Lindsay similarly breathes new life into literary classics and ancient Greek myths, taking, for example, the well-known motif of Orpheus's descent into the underworld and transforming it into a hauntingly resonant portrait of the vicissitudes of loss. Lindsay's poems exude an extraordinary ability of fusing the outlandish and the little-known historical minutiae with the unmistakably familiar markers of the human experience. Mount Clutter is a remarkably sustained and self-assured performance -- stirring new poetry from the acclaimed 1997 national Book Award finalist. "[A] vision that beckons the reader after it into unexpected recognitions." -- W. S. Merwin

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sarah Lindsay, the author of Primate Behavior, was born in Iowa in 1958 and was educated at St. Olaf College. Her work has appeared in many prominent magazines, including The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Georgia Review. She is the recipient of the Randall Jarrell scholarship awarded by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Sarah Lindsay lives in Greensboro with her husband and plays the cello with the Quartet mit Schlag.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree

He kept dreaming of a tree, dreaming
of a tree, dreaming of a tree
and its sound like a hush,
and it seemed he could open
his mouth when he woke and make the others
know something they didn’t already know,
his tree. But he woke and he couldn’t.

He kept thinking of a tree. He made a tree
of his arms and called to the others,
but all he could say, all they could say,
was tree, not that one, no, not here,
tree. They were hungry, shrugged and went on.

Later a leopard dragged him some distance
and left him on the remains of his back,
his plucked face tilted up, and a seed
fell on the stub of his tongue
in his open mouth. Took root,
sent a finger between his teeth
that parted his jaws with its gradual thickness
and lifted its arms full of leaves that fed
on what was in his braincase
and mixed with the sky, and made
a sound in the wind that was
almost what he wanted.

Mount Clutter

One day when the planet was idly
pressing stegosaurs in her scrapbook,
she threw out a whole plateau
of souvenirs from the Ordovician, on impulse.

She’d long since run out of places to put things—
one reason these organelles are crammed into cells—
and naturally disorder breeds disorder:
you get distracted, you put down that scribbled
fossilized note about Martian microbes,
and once you set a tectonic plate on top of it,
you may never find it again. Though all kinds
of stuff will turn up while you’re looking.

It’s a realistic carelessness
that lets prize bones weather out of a cliff and crumble,
that shrugs when a secret cave on the coast,
with paintings of hands, great auks, and well-fed horses,
is sniffed out by the rough wet nose of the sea.

You can’t expect your mother to save
your comic books forever, much less
her dried corsages,
snakeskins, pinecones, yearbooks, report cards,
and all the photo albums
from her life before you, on the chance
you might take an interest someday.

Be glad there’s an attic, and a bunch of keys
that might fit something. Over here,
a sack of marbles she won off the neighbor boys, a sea-green
pillbox hat with a veil, a whole drawerful
of crinoids, a petrified forest, stromatolites . . . and here,
wrapped in the sports page from August third, 500 million b.c.,
it’s the Cambrian worm Insolicorypha psygma:
dozens of bristles, a head divided in two,
if that was indeed the head. Once common as pennies;
now this is the only one. Go on rummaging,
brushing off dust, though you may find later
that it was the dust you wanted.

What if you don’t find
the Missing Link, the Conclusive Proof
of that cherished hypothesis you cooked up
along with the instant soup on your hot plate
amid the books and shirts and notes and dishes?

Just see what she left you, without being asked:
opposable thumbs, cerebral cortex,
cuneiform, a recipe for piecrust,
and, in this shadowy corner, the rock itself,
prehistoric, prenotional Mount Clutter,
on which Occam’s razor, like your inherited pocketknife,
is repeatedly wrecked and whetted.

Copyright © 2002 by Sarah Lindsay. Reprinted with permission from Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1 edition (September 19, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802139442
• ISBN-13: 978-0802139443
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,668,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I am in awe, August 26, 2005

By 

Honey Clark "book frog" (Collegeville, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mount Clutter (Grove Press Poetry) (Paperback)

This poetry is amazing. Some poems I had to read a few times before I could move on. The works deal mostly with the loss that progress always brings with it, and the joy of learning. There is sadness, but real wonder as well.

What else can I tell you about this book? I can tell you that it was the only one of the poetry books I got this month without a remainder mark. Then my cat (the one who loves books) chewed up a corner of it, so it's no longer perfect-looking. I can tell you that I'm madly in love with it. But poetry is a very personal thing, so the best thing you can do is read some of it and decide for yourself.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Balance of the Intellectual & Accessible, March 16, 2006

By 

David Miller "Akiva David Miller" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mount Clutter (Grove Press Poetry) (Paperback)

First let me say that I will refrain from using words like "obtuse," previously used by "Exacto 99" when he either meant to write "obscure" or just plain didn't know what "obtuse" really means - maybe he was trying to sound "smart." However, I will say that Sarah Lindsay's poetry is smart, sharp & witty, fresh and thought-provoking.

Although Ms. Lindsay hasn't yet earned a seat among today's elite poets (Who would after only two books?), she's certainly on her way. I believe most pedestrian readers will enjoy this work and find in it a wonderful balance of the intellectual and accessible.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully science-slanted !, January 4, 2004

By 

Arthur J. Stewart "Exacto_99" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mount Clutter (Grove Press Poetry) (Paperback)

I got a copy of "Mount Clutter" on the recommendation of an editor of a science magazine -- he was impressed with the author's effective use of science-oriented language. The book is excellent! Some of the poems incorporate obtuse points that make you stop and think -- they call upon you to explore. Other poems are direct, delightfully focused and take you carefully from "here" to "there", conveyed by excellent imagery. In a recent biology seminar to a group of students, I read "Introduction of the Brown Tree Snake" ("Mount Clutter" pages28-29) after explaining in more technical terms about the ecological damage cause by this snake's introduction to Guam. The poem was very effective -- it helped students understand that there are multiple ways of knowing! Science knowledge and literary skills are blended nicely in "Mount Clutter". This is surely a book worth reading, if you enjoy science, or poetry, or both!