Primate Behavior: Poems (Grove Press Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Sarah Lindsay (Author)

Book Description

Series: Grove Press Poetry Series | Publication Date: October 28, 1997

Once in a generation a young poet arrives with such an unexpected and compelling vision that readers take notice right from the start. With Primate Behavior Sarah Lindsay makes just such a debut. Her exuberant, witty, and outrageous poems have already stunned and delighted the readers of some of America's best magazines and journals. Primate Behavior is the product of a wild and exhilarating imagination, ranging wide across an abundant imaginary landscape. Sarah Lindsay writes of space migration and the cave paintings of 35,000 B.C. Her poems speak from the perspective of an embalmed mummy and detail the adventures of nineteenth century explorers. Lindsay investigates the world as no one has yet had the daring and inspiration to do, reanimating history and folk legend and setting in motion curious new worlds that speak eccentrically, but unmistakably, to their own. Primate Behavior is a remarkably sustained and self-assured performance. The Grove Press Poetry Series, which has brought the public both powerful retrospectives and the work of authors in mid-career, now introduces an exciting new poet, Sarah Lindsay. "Sarah Lindsay's molten imagination burns new channels for poetry. No lie." - Kay Ryan; "As a poet, Sarah Lindsay is fearless. Subjects others would find unpromising or intimidating she forms into poems of eerie, spectral beauty. Antarctic exploration, astronomical theory, the lungfish, the manatee, and the rotting orange-even Superman's puberty!-all are transmuted from strange Idea into graceful Song. Primate Behavior is a must read." - Fred Chappell.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The explorers who start to guide us through Sarah Lindsay's fine and verdant book Primate Behavior are untrustworthy and quickly killed off. Instead of hearing the "safely delivered story" of the first poem, we experience "the fugue on the chaos theme" shot from a circus performer's "Continuum Ray." Lindsay deals in surreal contrivances but keeps her natural histories unwaveringly precise and, further, emotionally moving; witness the final lines of "Lungfish Conquers Depression":

She doesn't know
why this time she pushes past the surface tension
and wimples up the minute incline
on jellied stumps...
She feels a pocket
flex inside her neck, she gapes
at the scoured entry of demanding air.

Wallace Stevens's lush surface pleasures live in abundance here, enhanced by Lindsay's meticulous zoology. Yet more musician than scientist, she introduces a section called "Circus Merk" as "a figment ... named after the composer Joseph Merk, one of whose cello etudes sounded to me as I practiced like circus music." In the book's final poem, "Cheese Penguin," Lindsay brings back one last explorer, who steals penguin eggs for science and accidentally leaves a red tin of cheese behind, from which evolves a penguin made of cheese. The narrator shrugs it off, saying, "The world is large / and without a fuss has absorbed stranger things than this." With such comic understatements, Primate Behavior at times reads like T.S. Eliot referencing Buffon's Natural History instead of The Golden Bough. And like Eliot, Lindsay brings a noticeably new energy to contemporary poetry with this breakthrough book. --Edward Skoog

Review

Accidentals
The Acts Of The Elephants
Alfred Russel Wallace In Venezuela
Aluminum Chlorohydrate
The Angel That Troubled The Waters
Arsinoitherium (fayum, 35 Million Years)
Blue Oranges
Borodin: Symphony In B Minor
Buprestidae, Cantharidae
By Luristan To Thule
Capt. Robert Falcon Scott Returns To London
Chang And Eng View A Giraffe
Cheese Penguin
Circus Merk And The Spectacular Conflagration
Circus Merk At The End Of The Flandrian Interglacial
Circus Merk's Queen Of Siberia
Circus Merk, 25,0000 B.c.
Constantinople, Plagur Summer
Courthope On Pulau Run, 1620
Dido Summons The Beetles
Dinosaur To Dragon
El Abuelo
Elephant Waltz
The End Of Circus Merk's Elephant Baseball Act
First Song For The Ba Of Ptah-hotep
Fossil Finds
The Hartunians Form The Tower In The Dark
Hidden At The Zoo
His Hot Breath Oon Her Cheek
Honey
Honeysuckle
Instead Of Acceptance
Lassie's Left Eye
Legend Of The Woolly Mammoth
Life On Earth, Part Twelve: The Business Salmon
A Lizard, A Stone
Lungfish Conquers Depression
Madame Vashti Sees The Future
Manatee In Honey
Musk Oxen Do Not Run Away
Nachtmusik
Neanderthal
Near Combe D'arc
Of What Earth Has Eaten, Something May Yet Be Found
Positive White
Primate Bahavior
Professor Enjo's Astounding Continuum Ray
Really Big Shew
See Circus Merk's Own Amazing Siamese Twins
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 1
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 101
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 105
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 112
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 12
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 136
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 137
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 138-152
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 14
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 153
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 159
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 162
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 17
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 18
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 2
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 27
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 30
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 36
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 40
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 42
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 5
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 55
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 67
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 71
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 72
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 78
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 79
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 80
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 81-83
Slides From Patagonia, 1896-99: 95
Slumgullion
So Were The Animals
Solipsist In Love
Superman In Sunglasses
They Live Here
Thor Swimming
Toby The Sapient Pig
Tornado Watch
Tyrannosaurus Sex
Us
Vegetables In Space
Venus Of Judith River
Voladora
Warming: Aletsch Glacier
What All It Takes
Where Thieves Break In And Steal
Whether Or Not A Giraffe Lies Down To Sleep
The Wreck Of The General Grant
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st Paperback Ed edition (October 28, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802135579
• ISBN-13: 978-0802135575
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #596,669 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars The real deal, May 6, 2011

By 

Simon G. Barrett (london, england) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Primate Behavior: Poems (Grove Press Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Sarah Lindsay spoils you for other poets. Preternaturally wise, she makes other verse seem trivial. Forget primates - all of life (and everything else) is her province; meaningful, and funny too - God as Ed Sullivan? There's no pretension, no striving for effect; this is honest-to-God thought - this Empress is fully kitted out! But don't take my word for it - read her, and then get the word out there.